51³Ô¹ÏÍø

Professor Alice Gast delivered her first President's Address to 51³Ô¹ÏÍø staff, students, alumni and friends on 3 March.

She used the occasion to explain her vision for the College, highlight its strengths and potential, and to look ahead to future threats and opportunities. 

Professor Gast spoke of her admiration for 51³Ô¹ÏÍø’s “spirit of discovery, passion for research and education, and sense of purpose.”

Addressing the community, the President, who took up her post in September 2014, said, “thank you for your warm welcome – and your patience with my American English.” 

Professor Gast set out her case that 51³Ô¹ÏÍø is defined by excellence, collaboration and impact. 

Vision, goals and aspirations

Trailing the College’s upcoming five-year strategy due to be published in summer 2015, Professor Gast referred to the emerging themes that capture 51³Ô¹ÏÍø’s vision, goals and aspirations. 

These include:

• Taking a broad and innovative view of 51³Ô¹ÏÍø’s educational mission, which will focus on rigorous academic training, while providing students with the practical, entrepreneurial and intellectual skills necessary to tackle societal problems.
• Exploiting the College’s London location. The capital is, “like 51³Ô¹ÏÍø, a global hub of thinking, activity and ideas.”
• Building and maintaining better ties with friends and alumni, engaging them in the College’s mission of academic excellence and societal impact.
• Sharing “the wonder and importance of what we do” to sustain support from the public and government, as well as attracting talented students.
• Building a supportive, diverse, considerate and highly-motivated community. 
• Securing the financial strength needed to deliver this vision.

51³Ô¹ÏÍø's Chair Baroness Manningham-Buller introduced Professor Gast

Emerging challenges

Professor Gast referred to emerging challenges to 51³Ô¹ÏÍø and the wider world of knowledge and discovery. She urged the community to remain vigilant towards threats to reliable support for research and education, restrictions on the free flow of talent across our borders, and rigidity in a world of changing social contracts and modes of learning. 

Praising the “ring fence” protecting UK science funding, Professor Gast warned that inflationary pressures on flat-cash budgets and reduced government capital funding could limit 51³Ô¹ÏÍø’s ability to sustain a world-class science, medicine, engineering and business university. She described the upcoming election and spending review as “critical times for the Government to remain an integral partner in our mission to deliver academic excellence and societal benefit.”

Calling for the diversity of 51³Ô¹ÏÍø’s richly international talent pool of students, staff and collaborators to be protected, Professor Gast said, “Retreating from the European Union would not serve the interests of our community. Limiting international student and staff access would also be self-defeating.”

Collaboration is key

Professor Gast added that collaboration is key to broadening 51³Ô¹ÏÍø’s societal impact – and often that means working with rivals and competitors.

“Collaboration and risk-taking go together,” she said. “In order to collaborate, one needs to be open, build trust and compromise,” just as the international scientific community did in response to the outbreak of SARS. 

Professor Gast meets guests after her Address

Universities should embrace the sort of calculated risk-taking that the best researchers are renowned for, Professor Gast argued. “We need to follow the example set by our researchers and make 51³Ô¹ÏÍø more agile and courageous,” she said, referring to the College’s opportunity to “redefine collaboration” at its new 25 acre campus in White City. 

Professor Gast concluded: “As we embark on this era of advocacy, agility, courage and collaboration,I ask that each member of the 51³Ô¹ÏÍø College community seize this opportunity. I ask everyone to be vocal advocates for what we do, to be agile and courageous with new ideas and to seek out new collaborations.

“We expect great things of ourselves and of each other. We each have a role to play and contributions to make to 51³Ô¹ÏÍø’s future. It is our individual and combined efforts that will write the next chapters of 51³Ô¹ÏÍø’s history.”