Category: College News & Updates

Applications open for Hackstarter (deadline: 13 Jan 2025)

📢 Apply to Hackstarter & Get Your Idea Off to a Great Start in 2025!

Imperial’s award-winning prototyping programme is open for entries!

Are you a student or staff innovator with an idea or product that you’d like made? Enter the Hackstarter competition to accelerate your prototyping and entrepreneurial journey.

🧠 All ideas welcome, from biology to engineering and beyond!

Why take part?

Receive funding and expert guidance to:

✔️ Progress an idea from first concept to a prototype
✔️ Develop new hardware skills and approaches to design physical prototypes
✔️ Design prototyping experiments to help validate, refine or discredit an idea quickly
✔️ Understand what the next steps are in your development journey

👉 Apply here: bit.ly/hackstarter-25

⏳ Deadline: 9am, 13 Jan 2025

Applications open for Global Fellows Programmes 2025 (deadline: 20 Jan 2025)

Applications are now open for the following Global Fellows Programmes:

PhD students from the institutions and all disciplines will come together to collaborate and network in these 5-day professional development courses.

In the current scientific environment, international collaborations and networking are the basis for developing successful projects. The modern researcher requires both excellence in research and professional skills and competencies. This exciting programme is designed to facilitate participants to actively focus on the development of these professional skills and competencies.

Doctoral candidates from any discipline are invited to apply. This is a chance to challenge yourself outside of your normal working environment, meet people from other disciplines and cultures, and have fun!

Our Global Fellows Programmes are worth four credits towards the professional development attendance requirement.

Applications close on Monday 20 January 2025

Find out more & apply

Coming Soon!

  • Imperial-Institute of Science Tokyo Global Fellows Programme
    10 – 14 November 2025 (date may be subject to change)
    Hosted by: Institute of Science Tokyo

International Family Network

Are you an international student with dependants ?   Our International Family Network is for all Imperial International Students who have their dependants with them in the UK.  We arrange fun trips and events for you and your family such as theatre trips , visits to London tourist destinations and also on campus events such as the traditional Easter Egg Hunt in the College Gardens  .  See our website for further details.

Join our mailing list here or email s.markey@imperial.ac.uk .

Postgraduate Climate Conscious Travel Fund

Introducing the Introducing the Postgraduate Climate Conscious Travel Fund 

We are excited to announce the launch of the Postgraduate Climate Conscious Travel Fund for this academic year, designed to help postgraduate students make more sustainable travel choices by supporting them with the costs associated with making greener travel choices.  

Did you know that 81% of Imperial’s carbon emissions come from external sources, otherwise known as Scope 3 emissions? Nearly half of these emissions stem from university-related travel. With the recent publication of Imperial’s Sustainable Travel Policy, we are committed to reducing our travel-related carbon footprint. However, we recognise that choosing greener travel options is not always the most affordable for postgraduate students. 

The Postgraduate Travel Fund has been created to help cover the extra costs of sustainable travel, ensuring that students aren’t left out of pocket. For instance, the fund would cover the price difference between travelling by train instead of flying, as illustrated in the table below. 

Route   Average Cost Return Economy   PG Travel Funding Provided  
   Flight   Rail     
London – Amsterdam   £130   £180   £50  
London – Frankfurt   £160   £220   £60  
London – Glasgow   £110   £140   £30  

If you’re interested in applying, please review the fund’s guidelines for details on what it will and won’t cover. Please note that funding is limited and will only be provided where no alternative funding sources are available. You can find the link to the application form here. 

New Trusted Research Training e-learning module

All staff with research, and academic responsibilities are expected to complete a new Trusted Research e-learning module. We encourage PhD students to complete this module too.

Research security considerations are increasingly important for universities across the UK, which includes minimising risks to national security during international research collaborations. It is crucial to ensure that everyone undertaking research at Imperial are aware of what Research Security is, its role in academia and key considerations when collaborating with research and funding partners overseas.

This module introduces Research Security, providing learners with insight into core principles including legal compliance, contractual obligations, and protective measures.

Joining instructions: You can self-enrol onto the course through the Trusted Research Module website.

Further training focused on export controls specifically will be released soon. If you are interested in being enrolled onto this module, please see the Research Security Training website for more information.

Additionally, the new Research Security website provides guidance on various areas of Research Security including the Trusted Research agenda, key legislation, and signposts other relevant areas of the university’s online guidance.

Access the New York Times to discover quality journalism

Access the New York Times to discover quality journalism

We are pleased to announce that we have purchased a subscription to the New York Times.  The subscription provides access to all Imperial students and staff.

Don’t miss this opportunity to stay informed and up to date with the latest news from one of the world’s most respected news sources.

You can access both New York Times website and app content, including the International, Chinese, and Spanish editions of the newspaper.

First-time users are required to register with their Imperial email address. Further details on how to register can be found on the Imperial website.

Imperial staff and students have full access to Overton

Following the College-wide trial for Overton, Imperial has now subscribed to the product.

All staff and students have full access to Overton. If you are within Imperial’s IP range, you will be able to browse Overton and see policy documents without logging in. However, we encourage to create a personal account to use all Overton’s functionalities. Get in touch with Yusuf Ozkan (y.ozkan@imperial.ac.uk) to request the registration link.

We will arrange a walkthrough session with the Overton team and let you know once the date is confirmed. In the meantime, you can check out the following resources:

1) A short video introducting Overton

2) Getting Started  section on Overton’s Knowledge Base to help get users oriented to the platform

3) You can also sign up to Overton’s newsletter  which contains new features and other useful information for users.

Overton is a policy document database and helps find the impact of academic research outputs within policy documents. It facilitates searches for policy documents, guidelines, think tank publications, and working papers. The product collects data from nearly 200 countries in various languages. Overton also tracks the impact of research outputs on policy by identifying references, people, and organisations. It reveals where research articles are cited or mentioned in policy documents.

You can contact Yusuf Ozkan, Research Outputs Analyst (y.ozkan@imperial.ac.uk) for your questions.
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Societal Engagement Reading Group

Are you interested in public engagement or outreach? You’re invited to join the Societal Engagement Reading Group as we discuss papers and articles exploring current thinking around public engagement, schools outreach and other related areas. Meeting regularly throughout the year (every 6 weeks), this reading group is open to all members of Imperial staff and doctoral students to have a friendly discussions about the chosen reading for the meeting and our work. Our next meeting is on Wednesday 07/02/2024.

Engagement or outreach practitioners and those who are keen to embed public engagement/outreach within their work may find this group particularly useful, as it’s an opportunity to reflect on the evidence base for engagement and draw from research to inform our practice.

  • We meet online via Teams, with occasional meetings in-person with invited speakers.
  • Readings are shared at least a month before each meeting but if you don’t have time to read it all, you are still welcome to join us and take part in the conversation.
  • Group members are encouraged to suggest readings and are welcome to volunteer to facilitate discussions (if they would like to).

If you would like to join the group and be included in calendar invites and Teams links for upcoming meetings, please complete this short form.

If you have any questions or would like to know more, please contact us and check out our webpage for more details

Upload your research seminar through Cassyni, for free

Cassyni is a platform for universities to organise, run, and publish online seminars in which researchers talk about their latest work. Seminar recordings are enhanced using Cassyni’s proprietary AI technology to produce high quality transcripts, extract slides, and resolve references to scholarly works contained in the talk, linking seminars to the wider scholarly literature. The enhanced recording is then published with a DOI making it part of the scholarly record.  

Funded through the Imperial Experience Project, in 2023-2024, the Graduate School is piloting a collaboration with Cassyni, to provide all Imperial PhD students the opportunity to publish a seminar about their research, for free, helping to increase the impact and visibility of their work and build research connections.

Once published your seminar will receive a citable DOI giving you another research output to add to your academic CV, helping you to stand out to future employers and increasing the impact of your research.

Find out more and access the dedicated Imperial sign-up portal

Apply for the Imperial Award

The improved Imperial Award is open to all students at Imperial, and can help you:

  • Develop practical self-reflection skills
  • Improve your ability to pitch yourself to various audiences
  • Gain a formal recognition from the College

The Imperial Award is designed to help you make the most of your experiences while at University by reflecting on them against the skills (attributes) valued by employers, and the wider community (such as leadership, problem solving and creativity).

Graduate School course mapping to Imperial Award

The following course mapping has been made by the tutors and programme leads for the Graduate School courses to highlight courses that may assist in recognising and developing attributes for the Imperial Award.

This list is not exhaustive but allows those attending these courses to consider the highlighted attribute when preparing their submission for the Imperial Award.

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“Imperial award gives you the opportunity to realise how much you’ve gone through, reflect on yourself, and more importantly makes you passionate to do more and make a difference! Being recognised not only by your educational achievements but also by your life experiences is something very unique and wonderful.” – PGT IA Achiever (2020)

Find out more