UCL India Summer School

Based at the state-of-the-art campus of The British School New Delhi, the 2026 UCL India Summer School gave pre-university students in India a taste of what it’s like to study at a world-leading UK university. It aimed to widen access to education by bringing UCL professors to India from London. It was open to Grade 11 students in India, who gained from a rigorous and exciting curriculum.

Register your interest for 2027

• Where and when
• Cost
• Teaching and learning
• On completion
• Eligibility
• Student voices

Where and when

• Dates: Monday 1 June – Saturday 6 June 2026
• Timings: 9am-4pm weekdays (Saturday 12.30-3.30pm)
• Location: The British School New Delhi, Dr Jose P Rizal Marg, Chanakyapuri, New Delhi 110021

Cost

UCL’s India Summer School is a non-profit, access-to-education programme that marks our desire to engage with India in a spirit of partnership. The Summer School fee for the 2026 programme was INR 40,000. This fee was set as low as possible, covering costs only. The fee was payable in rupees directly to The British School New Delhi. No profits accrue to either The British School New Delhi or UCL.

Teaching and learning

Our cutting edge, multi-disciplinary teaching programme was taught in person by professors travelling to India from London for one week. The Summer School required participants to think creatively, across disciplines, and to apply high-level knowledge and analysis to solving real-world problems. Students received immersive seminar teaching (class sizes capped at 12) in their chosen pathway subject.

Students on the 2026 programme chose from one of the following pathways: 

[n.b. pathways for 2027 are subject to review]

Technology and Culture

Pathway Lead: Dr François Sicard
Assistant Professor in Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering, Department of Arts and Sciences, UCL

At a time when technological solutions are increasingly presented as answers to almost every societal challenge, we have reached a point where “technosolutionism” dominates how innovation is imagined and valued. This often blurs the distinction between creation and innovation, while sidelining social, cultural, and ethical considerations. This pathway invites students to critically examine the future of innovation by asking not only what we create, but how, why, and for whom innovation takes place..

Emerging technologies such as machine learning, artificial intelligence, and blockchain will be discussed not only in technical terms, but also through questions of trust, confidence, legitimacy, and societal values. Students will reflect on innovation in diverse contexts, examining how cultural practices and social structures shape both technological design and technological impact.

The pathway introduces students to key ‘superconcepts’ such complexity, entropy, and resilience, that help bridge disciplinary boundaries and enable dialogue between different ways of knowing. In parallel, students are introduced to the foundations of interdisciplinarity, examining why disciplines exist, how they differ in their approaches to truth, evidence, and power, and the challenges that arise when bringing them together. Through this lens, the pathway demonstrates how superconcepts can help overcome disciplinary barriers and support the development of integrated forms of knowledge for engaging with uncertainty and complexity.

Some of the questions we will consider include:

• What role can interdisciplinary thinking play in shaping more transformative technologies?
• How can technologies be culturally informed, and what does it mean to ‘decolonise’ technological innovation?
• How are trust and confidence built, maintained, or lost in emerging technologies?

No prior technical or disciplinary knowledge is required for this pathway; students only need curiosity, openness, and a willingness to engage critically with ideas across disciplines, cultures, and perspectives.

Urbanisation and Infrastructure

Pathway Lead: Pushpa Arabindoo
Associate Professor, Department of Geography, UCL

With more than half of the world’s population living in cities, provision of infrastructural access across a diverse section of society is a major challenge. National investment in infrastructure has become a key agenda with the Indian government committing to a 1.3 million crores national master plan for infrastructure. 

In the context of rapid urbanisation, much of this (over 50 percent) is still unbuilt and will have to be in India’s fast-growing cities, compounded by the challenges of climate change. This summer school will consider these infrastructural challenges for urban India with a focus on the following questions:

• How do urbanisation and infrastructure intersect, posing challenges as well as offering opportunities?
• Can we think of infrastructure as more-than-physical assets as we consider the significance of social infrastructure to people’s metropolitan lives?
• What are the specific infrastructural policies that need to be in place in the urban context to ensure equity and justice?
• Who are the key actors and stakeholders and what does the process of infrastructural planning entail? How can it be made more inclusive?  

This pathway will use Delhi as a case study to explore how these infrastructural challenges are cross-sectoral (water, waste, energy, transport, etc.) and need to be addressed in a holistic manner. We will also be looking at the emerging field of digital infrastructure and the cost of infrastructure to ‘staying connected’.
 
Towards the end students will undertake a group activity to identify possible pathways to sustainable infrastructural solutions, ones that deliver positive economic and social impacts in line with the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Ecology, Society, and Urban Futures

Pathway Lead: Dr. Izzy Bishop
Lecturer in Ecology, People and Nature Lab (Division of Biosciences/UCL East)

Rivers are among the most powerful connective features within landscapes. They link mountains to cities, people to nature, and local places to distant seas. Across history, rivers have sustained ecosystems, supported food and water security, and shaped human health and wellbeing. Rivers also carry deep cultural, spiritual, and symbolic meaning. In Delhi, the Yamuna is not only a critical source of water and biodiversity, but also a sacred river embedded in religious practice, cultural identity, and everyday urban life. Yet this same river is now among the most degraded and contested waterways in the world, reflecting wider tensions between urbanisation, environmental protection, and social justice.

This pathway adopts an interdisciplinary approach. It draws on physical geography, ecology, public health, urban studies, and environmental governance to explore rivers as both natural systems and social spaces by asking:

• Why are rivers important for nature and people?
• What is a healthy river, and how can river health be defined across ecological, social, and cultural dimensions?
• How healthy are Delhi’s waterways?
• How can degraded rivers be restored to health in rapidly growing cities?
• Rivers as contested spaces: whose knowledge, and what types of information, count in river management and decision-making?

Using Delhi as a case study, the pathway will analyse river degradation and recovery through blue infrastructure and nature-based solutions, including river restoration, floodplain reconnection, and urban green-blue networks. Students will engage with data and monitoring practices, from conventional water-quality measurements to participatory and community-led monitoring, to evaluate how evidence is produced and used. The pathway will also introduce debates around river rights and personhood, and apply multi-criteria decision-making approaches to explore trade-offs between ecological health, economic development, cultural values, and social equity. By the end of the week, participants will have co-created a detailed map of Delhi’s waterways and a new river charter for the city. 

Psychology and the Human Brain

Pathway Lead: Professor James Kilner
Professor of Human Motor Neuroscience, Institute of Neurology, UCL

This pathway will introduce students to key principles and current theories about how our brains work, as well as conceptual issues, methodological approaches, and significant findings in the study of the human brain, their historical background, and the kinds of empirical evidence on which these findings are based. 

Each seminar will be framed by a simple question, such as:

• What are the basic building blocks of the human brain?
• How does the brain ‘sample’ the world?
• How do we move and interact with our environments?
• Is the brain a complicated ‘prediction machine’?

To begin answering such questions, participants in the pathways will engage with fMRI, EEG and MEG as well exploring machine learning approaches to big data sets, and how they have changed the study of the human brain. 

You will learn about how the human brain enables us to sense and perceive the world, how we move, how we communicate, and how we interact with each other. You will study the human brain by developing an understanding of what happens when there are disorders of our nervous system, for example, Parkinson’s Disease and Dementia. 

You will also learn about the difficulties we face in studying the human brain and the different methods, techniques and tools of analysis that have been developed to help us overcome or meet such challenges.

Laws and Ethics

Pathway Lead: Dr Isra Black
Associate Professor in Law and Vice Dean (International) in the Faculty of Laws, UCL

This pathway introduces and explores the disciplines of law and philosophy, with a focus on ethical questions raised in the context of health. Many branches of law and fundamental questions of ethics meet in the realm of human health, literally matters of life and death. The pathway will introduce you to different sources of legal rules (e.g. legislation, case law, human/constitutional rights) in different domains of law (e.g. public, criminal, private). We will look at how these rules are produced and employed by different legal actors (e.g. courts, legislators, litigants). In addition to developing your understanding of how law works, you will gain an evaluative perspective on ethics - how we identify what values and considerations matter and how we decide what we ought to do. 

Using examples from English and Indian law, we will explore questions such as:

• Does law succeed in discharging its function as a tool for ‘settling’ matters of ethics?
• Why is it not a crime for doctors to perform surgery?
• Why does the law value consent? And why care about consent to medical treatment? What should we do when people can’t give consent?
• How much choice should we give people about the manner and moment of their own death? Should there be a right to medical assistance to die?
• When might we permit (living) people to sell their organs or tissues for transplantation and who might we allow to buy?
• Would you choose lockdown or vaccine mandate, both, or neither, during an infectious disease pandemic?

No prior knowledge of law, ethics/philosophy, or health care/public health is required. All you need is curiosity about and an enthusiasm for discussion of issues that affect everyone in important ways over their lives, and about which there is enduring ethical and legal disagreement about what to do and how to do it.

All students also benefitted from a range of interactive lectures covering study skills, methods for university-level learning, and how to make a strong application to a UK university, and also had the opportunity to deliver group presentations - based on their learning and research - to their peers and professors.

On completion

In addition to their academic tuition, all students received a certificate of participation.

The summer school programme culminated on the Saturday with a valedictory ceremony and lunch event for family, friends, and professors.

Eligibility for 2026

• UCL India summer school was for grade 11s at the point of application (prior to 6 March 2026).
• Grade 10 board exams (or equivalent) had to have been sat in 2025. 
• Full, official grade 10 transcript had to be supplied with the application. 
• Admission was by merit, based on grade 10 public examination results or equivalent (e.g. IGCSE or IB 'middle years programme' results).
• For admission to the UCL India Summer School 2026, the minimum average overall score in grade 10 public examination was 90%, with a minimum 90% mark in English.
• The UCL India Summer School was non-residential.

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