Imperial College London (officially The Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine) is a public research university located in London, United Kingdom, specialising in science, engineering, medicine and business. Formerly a constituent college of the federal University of London, Imperial became fully independent in 2007, the 100th anniversary of its founding.
Imperial's main campus is located in the South Kensington area of central London on the boundary between the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea and the City of Westminster. It has additional campuses in the Chelsea, Hammersmith and Paddington areas of central London. With a total of 525,233 square metres of operational property, it has one of the largest estates of any higher education institution in the UK. Imperial is organised into four main academic units – Imperial College Faculty of Natural Sciences, Imperial College Faculty of Medicine, Imperial College Faculty of Engineering and the Imperial College Business School – within which there are over 40 departments, institutes and research centres.
Imperial has around 13,500 full-time students and 3,330 academic and research staff and had a total income of £705 million in 2010/11, of which £299 million was from research grants and contracts. Imperial is a major centre for biomedical research and is a founding member of the Imperial College Healthcare academic health science centre. It is consistently ranked among the top universities in the world, ranking 24th in the world (and 5th in Europe) in the 2011 Academic Ranking of World Universities, 6th in the world (and 4th in Europe) in the 2012 QS World University Rankings and 8th in the world (and 3rd in Europe) in the 2012 Times Higher Education World University Rankings. There are currently 14 Nobel Prize winners and two Fields Medal winners amongst Imperial's alumni and current and former faculty.
Imperial is a member of the Association of Commonwealth Universities, the Association of MBAs, the European University Association, the G5, the IDEA League, the League of European Research Universities, Oak Ridge Associated Universities and the Russell Group. It forms part of the 'Golden Triangle' of British universities.
Read more about Imperial College London: Campus, Academics, Notable Alumni, Faculty and Staff, Friends of Imperial College
Famous quotes containing the words imperial, college and/or london:
“The imperial votaress passed on,
In maiden meditation, fancy-free.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“... when you make it a moral necessity for the young to dabble in all the subjects that the books on the top shelf are written about, you kill two very large birds with one stone: you satisfy precious curiosities, and you make them believe that they know as much about life as people who really know something. If college boys are solemnly advised to listen to lectures on prostitution, they will listen; and who is to blame if some time, in a less moral moment, they profit by their information?”
—Katharine Fullerton Gerould (1879–1944)
“I lately met with an old volume from a London bookshop, containing the Greek Minor Poets, and it was a pleasure to read once more only the words Orpheus, Linus, Musæus,—those faint poetic sounds and echoes of a name, dying away on the ears of us modern men; and those hardly more substantial sounds, Mimnermus, Ibycus, Alcæus, Stesichorus, Menander. They lived not in vain. We can converse with these bodiless fames without reserve or personality.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)