Capital's universities invest £10 million in health and engineering initiatives

Citation

(2003), "Capital's universities invest £10 million in health and engineering initiatives", Anti-Corrosion Methods and Materials, Vol. 50 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/acmm.2003.12850daf.004

Capital's universities invest £10 million in health and engineering initiatives

Capital's universities invest £10 million in health and engineering initiatives

Keywords: UK, Universities, Engineering

The strategic alliance of two of London's leading universities, Queen Mary, University of London and City University, is to invest £10 million in developing new programs and promoting widening participation in engineering and healthcare education.

City and Queen Mary's strategic alliance aims to develop a collaborative work to mutual advantage. The two institutions will build more powerful teaching and research activities to serve the needs of their shared local community of the city and east London, and other stakeholders. This joint project is designed to integrate and develop provision in the fields of engineering and healthcare, and to respond to local and professional needs.

In engineering, collaborative projects will be developed between the two universities to enhance student recruitment, retention, and to widen participation by under-represented groups. Pre-university bridging courses and foundation degrees will be extended to prepare students in a better way for undergraduate study. The engineering curriculum will be reviewed to enable students to transfer between courses at each institution.

A Graduate Engineering Institute will be established to develop effective training partnerships between industry and higher education that will respond more effectively to the needs of industry. Industry-relevant master's degrees will be developed in the areas where there is an established demand from employers.

Professor Adrian Smith, Principal of Queen Mary University of London commented: "Queen Mary and City's strategic alliance is an example of genuinely collaborative thinking and action between two higher education institutions, as encouraged by the government's higher education strategy. Our investment, plus substantial funding from the NHS and HEFCE, underlines our commitment to national priorities of developing skilled professionals in the fields of health and engineering".

Professor David Rhind, Vice-Chancellor of City University, London, said: "This initiative comes at a time of financial pressure on all universities. But it has a compelling logic, bringing together a remarkable spread of intellectual skills and a variety of funding sources to create some very imaginative programs. Together, our two institutions will deploy our resources to create real growth in the social and economic welfare of the region and crucially to extend educational opportunity to new sectors of the population".