Security science and university research culture: a Friday Forum
It’s Friday lunchtime, 23rd January 2026, and the SAFB mezzanine is buzzing with life and conversation. Undergraduates, postdocs, managers and the professorial staff are lunching together, and there is a sense of anticipation. And that’s as it should be, for about to start is a Friday Forum, one of those Good Science Project events where Imperial people can step back from their busy day for a brief hour, meet over sandwiches, and get stuck into some knotty ethical issue currently confronting science.
We science communication master’s students are there to keep a record, write this blog, and get a sense of the debate. And from the start we see a strong and genuine interest, an eager desire to reflect on the role of science in a world where war seems startlingly present. The title of the Friday Forum, Security Science and Research Culture: Protecting What We Care About, is certainly suggestive. Folded into that interesting title is the idea that the moral priorities of ‘defending what we care about’, through security science research, have implications for how we run our campuses, and how we envisage research culture.
‘We are at war’, wrote the Guardian columnist Gabby Hinsliff, a few months after the Forum. She was referring not so much to the wars enveloping Gaza, Lebanon and Iran, as to news of Russian surveillance of British undersea cables in the North Atlantic, and to the weekly average of four ‘nationally significant cyber-attacks’. As Hinsliff put it, the United Kingdon is vulnerable to ‘a highly deniable form of shadow warfare [that] weaponises a country’s own weaknesses and prejudices back against it, while stopping short of causing casualties’. Security science, then, is a serious aspect of the political agenda, with much work going on to define where security weakness might exist in the national fabric, and much analysis to make sure that our definitions of ‘war’ are up to date, and not dependent on traditional expectations of invasion and troop movement. This was the basis of the Strategic Defence Review, commissioned by the government, and published on June 2nd, 2025.
Clearly then, our Forum was timely. Dr Stephen Webster, leader of the Good Science Project, briefed us on the provenance of this particular event. He had been in conversation, he told us, with Professor Phil Sutton, a visiting professor here at Imperial, an engineer, and someone who for many years has been a government adviser on security matters. The conversation had turned, Stephen told us, on identifying the ethical issues concerning ‘security science’. We are all familiar with the concept of the ‘Just War’, recently brought into the headlines by the spat between President Trump and Pope Leo. Less familiar perhaps is the enquiry about how the priorities of security science, which at times include secrecy, might impact on the ordinary academic virtues of trust, transparency and openness.
Essentially, Stephen had put to Phil this question: does security science act as a brake to the lively to-and-fro of dynamic academic analysis? And on this, Phil’s answer was clear. Although there might sometimes be a need for ‘classified research’ security science innovation in the main is no different from other forms of STEM innovation: security science innovation is driven bythe academic virtues, and depends on them as much as does, say, CRISPR technology. As Phil put it, successful security science research, at large on an academic campus, will fit well with, and indeed enhance, all the communitarian and critical aspects of a thriving university culture. Hearing this, Stephen knew at once that the topic would make an excellent Friday Forum, and he knew also that Phil should be on the panel.
Some months later, then, the audience was filtering through the door of a room on the mezzanine of the Sir Alexander Fleming Building, looking forward to the opening comments of Professor Mary Ryan, our Vice-Provost (Research and Enterprise). Mary was enthusiastic about the role of debates like these at Imperial and welcomed the conversation about to unfold. She said that there is no ‘classified’ research at Imperial, but more generally, she said, in the strengthening of security there is a strong role for a research-intensive university like Imperial. As she put it, ‘protecting what we care about’ maps well onto a university’s obligations to society, and might well include the desire to protect all that is best about the academic life’. In other words, we bloggers thought, a reflective research culture, one that continually ponders the values of academic research and of laboratory life, will be a significant component of a country’s security. And as Mary reminded us a minute later, to properly involve the whole College community in the ethical aspects of its research choices, and to build a culture of commitment to innovation and scientific evidence, lively and open debate is a necessary ingredient. It was in these terms, then, that Mary introduced our eminent panel, consisting of Phil Sutton; Professor Hugh Griffiths FRS, of UCL; and Professor Małgorzata Zachara-Szymańska, of the Jagiellonian University in Poland.
Professor Sutton gave the first talk. He reminded us that his perspective was shaped by a deep knowledge – indeed a lifetime – of security research, but he didn’t feel as though he was some special repository of hidden information. On the contrary Phil stressed that his work has been played out in the open, drawing in many people and depending always on critique and scrutiny. And that is how it should be, he said. Recalling that the Ministry of Defence sponsors many PhD students, Phil reminded the audience that those students retain the same intellectual freedom as their peers. Such postgraduates, like all researchers, are drawn to questions that demand creativity, in their case ranging from remote sensing challenges as simple as detecting camouflage, to broader problems where innovation, collaboration and interdisciplinarity are crucial to the reliable development of ideas and technologies. In another point, Phil added that defence-funded research often escapes its original context, and takes on a civic form, the so-called ‘dual use’ aspect of science. In this sense, then, it is a false dichotomy to make a distinction between ‘security science’ and ‘ordinary civic science’.
Professor Hugh Griffiths FRS, THALES/Royal Academy Chair of Radio Frequency Sensors in the Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering at UCL, was our next speaker. Hugh emphasised the timeliness and the importance of the debate occurring that day in the Friday Forum: universities cannot ignore security science first and foremost because there are foreign threats for which the United Kingdom must prepare. ‘Universities cannot stand at a polite distance from defence, they are one of its most serious expressions’, he said. Hugh went on to re-affirm Phil Sutton’s points, emphasizing that most defence research is published in the conventional matter, openly and fully dependent on peer review. There may be a direction to our defence needs, but this need not mean that the constraints are onerous or in some sense contrary to academic norms. For example, the defence industry’s ‘accelerator’ programme is a mechanism that funds specific themes, but bolts onto its projects only a minimum of contractual obligation. Hugh did touch on some significant imperfections in the security science ecosystem, where he sees room for improvement. First of all, many senior military officers do not have a technical background, but are ‘people persons’, creating problems of expectation and communication. Second, Hugh acknowledged that the dynamic and changing needs of procurement need careful management in relation to university norms: get that wrong, and things slow down. Related to this comes the problem of obsolescence: expensive equipment can fall out of date rather too quickly, if a degree of adaptability and ‘upgrade-readiness’ is not made part of the design. Hugh was clear about the importance of this and pointed out a clear truth: the maintenance of optimal equipment standards is of the utmost importance and should shape everything we do. He ended his talk by calling for more open debate on these matters, and he re-assured the audience that people working in defence are often highly reflective of their work. Hugh called on us to frame security science as ‘the protection of our way of life’. From his perspective, this is a newly urgent priority, one that universities must fully elaborate and convert into technology innovation. Alongside the laboratory work and the building of teams we need constant discussion of the broader social context. Morals have to be constantly examined, Hugh said, if we are to keep our science strong, and a boon to society.
It was appropriate, then, that our final panelist, Professor Małgorzata Zachara-Szymańska, of the Institute of American Studies and the Polish Diaspora at Poland’s Jagiellonian University, spoke about the social dimensions of the military imperative. Echoing Phil and Hugh, Małgorzata stressed that it is a myth that security are cloaked ‘heavily within the veil of secrecy’. She elaborated on a point that also had been subtly present in her fellow-panelists’ talks, emphasising the way a strong security ‘push’ by a nation, or group of nations, such as we see today with discussions about the funding of NATO, requires deep engagement with the wider population. Małgorzata, being an academic at the Jagiellonian university, lives in Kraków and experienced therefore the massive influx of Ukrainian refugees when the war with Russia began. Shortly after the invasion, the area around Kraków became highly ‘securitised’, with the Polish army, and arms movements, an evident part of everyday life. At the same time the plight of Ukrainian refugees streaming across the border drew from the Polish population an astonishing, largely informal, and spontaneous expression of hospitality. At the time the militarization, the change to the civic space, had been unsettling, but it became evident that the new emphasis on security was re-enforced and made more human and effective by the population’s daily response to the crisis. For Małgorzata this moment of cultural change illustrated something important: that security science depends on the belief and trust of the population, as much as it does on technology innovation. Or, to put it another way, social innovation and security innovation go hand in hand. As Małgorzata has it, this ‘tech/civic’ relationship is precisely the partnership that research-intensives universities such as Imperial are so good at fostering.
Before the panel opened up to questions from the audience, Mary asked the important and familiar question: are scientists responsible for the consequences of their work? Phil replied that it is vital to try to imagine how your work may have an impact, beyond what is obvious or intended. The responsibility may not be yours, for something that happens years hence, but nevertheless some reflection is required. Necessarily this is a work of imagination and is harder at the beginning and less reliable, than when a technology has matured, by which time paths may be fixed and history has set off on another path. At that point, you might say, the fork on the road is behind us. Małgorzata, also responding to the question, noted that with impact and utility such a priority for innovation, this imaginative work is really important, because we move so quickly from the laboratory to societal application. The problem is that scientists need the time to reflect; and time is in short supply, in our contemporary, busy, research culture.
Owen Jackson, director of the Imperial Policy Forum and a member of the audience, recalled his experience in the civil service. He noted the necessity of strong relations between policy makers and science innovation, something obviously necessary if security research in universities is to be well-directed and well-used. Phil Sutton took up the point, commenting that we always need initiatives to bring Whitehall departments into closer collaboration with the universities.
Finally, the event’s ‘respondent’, Professor Matthew Santer, a co-director in Imperial’s School of Convergence Science, took a few minutes to summarise the session. For Matthew a key theme that came to his mind concerned the relative moral responsibilities of the individual and the institution. No great problem need bedevil that relation, he suggested, as long as we talk to each other, and reflect upon the issues.
As the Friday Forum came to an end, we bloggers had many thoughts about the meeting itself and about the reaction of attendees. We found ourselves echoing the panel’s conclusions: the more we debate the future of security science, the better. Yes, the UK needs to defend itself and its allies, and universities have a central role in security research and innovation. Yet, clearly, there are ethical issues here, including questions about how we make decisions about our research priorities, how we come together as an academic community to appraise our aims, and how we teach our students and develop our curricula.
Watch the video attached to learn more about the Friday Forum [video link].