The strength of our research culture, integrity, quality and impact is demonstrated through successive Research Excellence Frameworks. Our success in competitive research awards also indicates how our culture of excellence contributes to the growth of the University, with our highest-ever levels of research income reported in recent years.
Our internationally leading approach is demonstrated in the quality of our diverse research outputs and in the academic, industrial and third sector partners with whom we work across the globe. This tangible impact benefits society directly and stimulates new research challenges and opportunities – both fundamental and applied.
Ours is a connected and collaborative community both internally, in terms of our interdisciplinary research that explores the impact of advances in science and technology on society, the economy and industry, and externally, in terms of our partnerships with other sectors and our impact on society. This connectivity delivers our distinctive contribution to the social, economic and cultural life of Glasgow, Scotland and the wider world.
We will continue to organise our research themes and innovation clusters around industrial and societal challenges, bringing interdisciplinary research approaches to resolve them, and will actively use the UN Sustainable Development Goals to articulate how our research expertise supports our socially progressive approach.
We refresh and build upon our themes from Vision 2025 and continue our successful trajectory:
- Health & Wellbeing
- Innovation & Entrepreneurship
- People, Place & Policy
- Ocean, Air & Space
- Energy
- Advanced Manufacturing & Materials
- Measurement, Digital & Enabling Technologies
- Global Challenges
In 2030, our world-leading and highly successful research community will continue to demonstrate that Strathclyde has a research culture and environment that pushes the boundaries of knowledge and its application to improve the world around us. We will see this in our success in income attraction, engagement with our research, and through being actively sought out to deliver impact in partnership with other sectors.
Distinctive Strathclyde
Read more about how we are distinctive in our world-leading research.
People First
Our approach to building a high-performing and distinctive research culture is effective because it is based on our Strathclyde values and in particular our focus on people. We support and develop our researchers and research enabling staff at all stages of their careers so that they have the training, skills and infrastructure to enable the highest quality research and impact, starting with the world-leading support offered to our research students through the Strathclyde Doctoral School and tailored career development throughout.
Social & Environmental Sustainability
We work with partners from communities, commercial and governmental organisations to understand the significant challenges facing societies around the world and bring together collaborative teams to both address them and build knowledge to prevent or mitigate these challenges in the future.
Process, Systems & Digital
We will deploy technology and training to support our researcher community to maximise the impact of key technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, big data, and collaborative platforms to enable successful global collaboration. This includes investment in high-performance computing and developing our associated communities of practice.
Our strategic aims
Strategic aim 2.1: Research Culture & Integrity
We have a rich and distinctive research culture that enables all members of our research community to achieve and develop, and that delivers high quality research.
We will achieve this by:
- working collaboratively as a community of postgraduate and staff researchers, academics, technicians, KE staff and research enablers to foster a successful and thriving research culture that promotes bold and ambitious research with a view to being thought leaders in our fields of research. We will set clear and understandable standards for research integrity to support researchers to fulfil their legal, professional and ethical obligations. As a socially-progressive university, diversity and inclusion will be a cornerstone of our research culture
- recruiting and retaining outstanding academic staff, researchers, technicians, KE staff, research enablers and research students. We will actively nurture them at all stages of their careers through support, development and collaborative opportunities in which they can grow their research and build their careers. We will pursue external research funding to invest in our excellent research environment, particularly supporting early- and mid-career staff in advancing quickly. We will grow our population of high-quality postgraduate researchers with enhanced support through the Strathclyde Doctoral School
- implementing our digital strategy focusing on supporting our researchers and students to develop their digital skills, while investing in our research infrastructure, both buildings and equipment, with the support of our research partners and funders
Strategic aim 2.2: Collaborative Research & Impact
Our research culture embraces and actively develops cross-disciplinary and multi-organisation collaborative approaches to bring together the best research teams and stakeholder partners to solve industrial, societal and global challenges.
We will achieve this by:
- fostering a collaborative and multi-disciplinary approach to societal and global issues, influencing, shaping and responding to UK, Scottish Government and international policy with multidisciplinary team approaches, and using the UN Sustainable Development Goals to demonstrate how our research is impacting on progress towards these
- continuing to demonstrate the distinctive value of being a leading international technological university that is socially progressive through the successful integration of our research in Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths with our Business, Humanities and Social Sciences to deliver innovative approaches to expanding knowledge and delivering successful solutions to global challenges
- continuing to develop externally facing collaborative research centres which draw on disciplinary knowledge from multiple disciplines and which both solve challenges and stimulate new academic research across the University. We will identify, with our partners, new key areas of focus for research and co-investing
- developing academic leadership for our collaborative and multidisciplinary centres and partnerships, recognising the important skills required to set out a successful vision, coordinate activity to deliver this, and skills to lead diverse groups in a values-led way
Strategic aim 2.3: Internationally Leading Research
Our research is internationally leading and our approach distinctive, attracting global partners from different sectors to work with us.
We will achieve this by:
- building our research collaborations with leading academic partners, business, industry, government and the third sector, both locally and globally, underpinned by our commitment to useful learning, adopting Trusted Research approaches that manage risk, and delivering impact for the world around us
- ensuring our research and knowledge reaches the widest possible audience, delivers reputational benefits, fulfils our commitment to support research integrity, and clearly demonstrates the quality and value of our research to society, potential partners and funders
- enhancing the quality of our research outputs and adopting an informed publication strategy, including progressing towards fully open access publishing and open research data in line with the FAIR Principles. We will also prioritise appropriate strategies to engage audiences with our research, enhance our public awareness activities and to improve our performance in metrics that demonstrate a flourishing research community, and wider access and engagement with our research