Professor David Bogle

Welcome to UCL

Welcome to UCL and to the Doctoral Researcher Compass. The Compass outlines the support available to you as a research student on one of our PhD, professional doctorate, MD(Res) or MRes programmes at UCL. We at UCL are committed to ensuring that the quality of your research training is of the highest level. We believe that a high quality research environment informs high quality education and we are proud to have been judged to be one of the leading research universities in the world.

There is no doubt the research world has been changed by the Covid-19 pandemic. Our research and research training has continued during the crisis using on-line communications even when buildings, labs and archives were closed albeit with inevitable changes. As we come out of the pandemic the changes we made that our students and supervisors told us provide benefit have been embraced.

Currently UCL has around 8,000 research students and over 6,000 academic and research staff involved in your supervision spread across our 11 faculties.

UCL academic staff have some of the strongest backgrounds in their specialist fields in the world. UCL is a centre of innovative cross-disciplinary research and across the College the research students play avital part in this stimulating research environment. Welcome to this community.

“We want you to become ‘creative, critical, autonomous intellectual risk takers’ through your research degree at UCL”

These characteristics are also sought in leadership roles in many areas beyond research and we hope to give you the opportunity to find out more about these too during your time here. Research is an international business so it is important that you gain experience communicating and defending your work nationally and internationally.

As a member of UCL we expect you to strive for the highest standards of integrity in your work and I encourage you to read the information, including UCL’s Statement on Research Integrity, on UCL’s research integrity web pages.

The Doctoral School is here to ensure that your time at UCL fulfils your needs and expectations, equips you for leadership roles in the research world and elsewhere, and enables you to make the most of the excitement of research. We look after your interests through a Code of Practice for Research Degrees which sets out clearly the standards you can expect from UCL.

The Doctoral School online Research Student Log provides a means to manage your project and to track your research career at UCL. It gives a focus to help you develop skills which you can apply to both the academic and non-academic worlds to set you up for your future career.

Through courses, inter-disciplinary programmes and scholarships we encourage students to look beyond the boundaries of their chosen discipline, as well as sharing and broadening knowledge across disciplines through societies and competitions.

In this Compass you will find details of activities and events to support you during your time here, and how you can benefit from them. More information and resources can be found on our regularly updated website at www.ucl.ac.uk/docschool.

The strategy for doctoral education at UCL can also be found there.

We in the Doctoral School are here to give advice particularly on issues you may wish to discuss outside your department that may arise during our time at UCL – to help when things go wrong, as well as to celebrate your successes.

I would like to wish you the best for your research at UCL and encourage you to make the most of the rich and diverse research training environment at UCL.

I look forward to meeting you at some of our forthcoming events.

Professor David Bogle FREng
Pro-Vice-Provost of the Doctoral School