Our University Community
Research and Innovation
Our Railway Engineering group, which was awarded the Queen’s Anniversary Prize in 2017, has extensive collaborations with industry, including securing circa £15m investment through the Research Partnership Investment Fund. Our world-leading High Temperature Research Centre is built on a £60m investment from Rolls-Royce and this collaboration won the 2023 Queen’s Anniversary prize. We run one of the four national quantum technology hubs, an £80m initiative that focuses on technology transfer from fundamental science to application.
At Birmingham, we teach and research across the full breadth of academic disciplines, creating a vibrant community with multidisciplinary opportunities for research and education from Medicine to Music. We are a truly international community, comprising more than 9,000 staff, 38,000 students, and over 350,000 alumni. Our student community is not only one of the largest of any UK university, but also highly diverse, with 86% of our home undergraduate students from state schools, 43% from black, Asian or other minority ethnic backgrounds, and 36% in the first generation of their family to attend university. We have a diverse staff community: over one-third of our academic staff are from overseas, around 22% of
our staff are from black, Asian or other minority ethnic backgrounds, and 5% have a declared disability. Our most recent staff survey indicates levels of engagement and pride which most employers would be pleased to achieve, and we are committed to building on this through the inclusion of ‘people and culture’ as a core pillar of the Birmingham 2030 Strategic Framework. We value our diversity and aim to provide a welcoming and inclusive environment for all members of the University community. We believe our diversity is a source of strength that underpins the exchange of ideas, innovation and debate at the heart of our academic mission. We hold a Bronze Race Equality Charter Award and a Bronze Athena SWAN Charter Award at institutional level, with many school- level awards at both silver and bronze. Our ED&I activities are well supported and embedded across the University of Birmingham. Birmingham 2030 strengthens our commitment to sustainability as one of the core pillars of our activity. This includes using our research and education to make a major global contribution to the UN Sustainable Development Goals, a headline to be net zero by 2045 and a link to our Sustainability framework can be found here. We are active partners in Birmingham’s Tyseley Energy Park developing new technologies to contribute to Birmingham’s net zero ambitions.
The University is one of the UK’s most successful institutions in terms of research. In the latest Research Excellence Framework, we were placed 10th in terms of GPA, with the highest rise in position of any Russell Group university, and with significant improvements across the breadth of our disciplines – a genuine University-wide achievement. Our areas of research excellence are unusually comprehensive for a UK university, with a submission to 28 of a possible 34 Units of Assessment in the REF2021. The total value of research funding won by the University has grown rapidly in recent years, and we now have a portfolio of over 2,800 live projects with an award value to the University of over £900m. Our academic community achieves remarkable things. We have been integral to some of the greatest scientific discoveries of recent times, such as the discovery of the Higgs boson particle and the detection of gravitational waves. We enjoy world-class expertise in areas as diverse as mental health, Shakespeare studies, global maternal health, formulation engineering, quantum technology, psychology, water science, air pollution, corpus linguistics, inter-faith understanding, and character education. Our robust industrial partnerships support enterprise and innovation across several sectors, working with companies as diverse as Siemens, AstraZeneca, and the Royal Shakespeare Company, and drawing on our innovation assets such as the Birmingham Health Innovation Campus and the Manufacturing Technology Centre in Ansty, near Coventry.
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