Departments and Research Centres
The university is organised into four faculties, comprising 18 schools and departments, spanning the Humanities, Law and Management, Social Sciences and Science and Engineering. In the last national Research Assessment Exercise the University of Essex was ranked ninth overall, with many schools and departments confirmed as amongst the best in the country.
Its departments of Economics, Government (Political Science) and Sociology are well-known and are among the best in Europe. Essex's research in politics, economics and sociology received top (5*) ratings in the UK government's 2001 Research Assessment Exercise. The Sociology department is the only in the country to have been awarded the highest rating in all six of the national Research Assessment Exercises (RAE) that have been undertaken since 1986. In the RAE 2008, Essex has reconfirmed its position as the UK’s leading university in the social sciences with Politics and Sociology ranked in first position, and Economics in third position nationally. According to Times Higher-QS world ranking exercise, Essex ranks as the 44th best in the world in Sociology and belongs to the 51-100 best in the field of Politics and International Studies.
Also in the RAE 2008, the Essex Business School was ranked second in the UK in the Accounting and Finance subject area, while History was also ranked in second place, Linguistics fourth, and Art History ninth in the UK. The results for History (second in the UK, 35 per cent of research rated ‘world-leading’) and Philosophy (11th in the UK, 20 per cent of research ‘world-leading’) come within months of both departments being ranked second in the UK for overall student satisfaction in the National Student Survey (NSS). Essex featured in the UK’s top ten in half of the 14 subject areas submitted.
The Institute for Social and Economic Research (ISER) is a research centre for the analysis of panel data in Economics and Sociology. It opened in 1989 as the ESRC Research Centre on Micro-Social Change in Britain and now houses the ESRC-funded Understanding Society project, a longitudinal study of the socio-economic circumstances and attitudes of 100,000 individuals in 40,000 British households.
In September 2000 the East 15 Acting School became part of the university. The school is based in Loughton in southwest Essex and has a branch in Southend.
The School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering was inaugurated on 1 August 2007. It was created by merging two long-established departments: The Department of Computer Science and the Department of Electronic Systems Engineering which both began in 1966. It has particular strengths in Robotics, Telecommunications, Artificial Intelligence and Logic and Computation. In 1999 a robotic football team from the department came third in the RoboCup 99 - part of the Robot Wars (TV series). Current notable academics in this school include Richard Bartle, best known as co-creator of MUD1, Edward Tsang for his work on constraint satisfaction and computational finance, Professor Ray Turner for his numerous publication relating to Logic and Computation, Professor Vic Callaghan as head of the Intelligent Environments Group (IEG) and Simon Lucas for his research into Computational Intelligence and Computer Games namely for his research with the UK Research Network on Artificial Intelligence and Video Game technologies. In the Research Assessment Exercise 2008 the University of Essex scored well in Computer Science and Informatics achieving 50% for research at level 3 of the RAE scale and 40% at level 3 in Electrical and Electronic Engineering.
The Photonics Hyperhighway project began in 2010 and is planned to run for six years. It was funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) with an aims to focus on energy-efficient ultra high capacity ICT infrastructure. The project plans to make broadband internet 100 times faster including partnership with the BBC to help broadcast ultra high definition content.
The Centre for Computational Finance and Economic Agents (CCFEA) is an interdisciplinary centre. It applies computational intelligence techniques to computational finance and computational economics. Essex was the first UK university to offer Master degrees in Computational Finance.
The Institute of Democracy and Conflict Resolution (IDCR), is planning a new flagship building on the Knowledge Gateway part of the Colchester campus, having appointed world-renowned architect Daniel Libeskind, an alumnus of the university.
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“We all have—to put it as nicely as I can—our lower centres and our higher centres. Our lower centres act: they act with terrible power that sometimes destroys us; but they don’t talk.... Since the war the lower centres have become vocal. And the effect is that of an earthquake. For they speak truths that have never been spoken before—truths that the makers of our domestic institutions have tried to ignore.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)