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We are proud of our extensive links with other international institutions and are committed to maintaining a truly global outlook through shared expertise and mutual learning.
Growing Indian partnerships in 2020
Although the pandemic made international travel impossible, we continued to foster activity with colleagues globally. Our activities ranged from a virtual summer school with Indian students through to a join webinar series in collaboration with Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Delhi.
Global Healthcare Engineering Symposium 2019
A delegation from AIIMS India with members of the Institute of Healthcare Engineering, the Global Engagement Office and UCL Provost, Prof Michael Arthur (centre)
On 8 July 2019, the Institute of Healthcare Engineering hosted the 'Global Healthcare Engineering Symposium' at UCL. This all-day event brought together UCL researchers in global health and healthcare technologies to share and learn from each others' experiences.
Read our report on the Symposium
All India Institute of Medical Science (AIIMS), New Delhi and Indian Institute of Technology (IIT-Delhi)
AIIMS is India's number one hospital for research. The hospital is a city in itself with 50,000 daily footfall. The staggering volume and diversity of cases combined with clinical excellence provide incredible potential for collaboration.
IIT-Delhi is renowned for its expertise in robotics, computer science, assistive technology, smart materials and biopharmaceuticals. The strong synergies between the healthcare engineering work being done at UCL and the research at IIT-Delhi provide ripe opportunity for partnerships.
Read our full report on our collaboration
Applying engineering technologies to tackle the globe's biggest healthcare challenges
Developing innovative technologies that are also affordable is a necessity in the healthcare landscape of emerging economies like India, as medical practitioners often have to deliver services where infrastructure is limited. Within India a significant proportion of its 1.4 billion citizens live near or below the poverty line and medical care is generally paid for out of their own pockets, meaning that product development must be inexpensive in order for it to be adopted.
What is significant, is that this low-cost constraint has not compromised the quality of the healthcare innovations coming out of India. Affordable, effective and accessible alternative solutions are being created for patients with regularity.
Collaboration with our Indian partners offers exciting potential for bidirectional learning. It is a chance to explore how the kind of digital and engineering technologies that we are developing at UCL could be applied to effectively work in low-resource settings. By working with partners on the ground we can get a better sense of what the real challenges are and what is needed to make technologies translatable and usable.
There is also a lot to be learnt from India's approach to affordable innovation. As the NHS faces its own resource constraints, this need has become particularly pertinent. Reversing a frugal mindset back into our own UK-based research offers the potential to save the NHS significant resources, which could then be directed toward patient care instead.
International colloquium speakers
Image: Prof Ishwar Puri (centre), McMaster University
As part of our ongoing colloquium series, we've hosted a number of world-leading speakers from institutions across the globe:
- Prof Ishwar Puri, McMaster University, Canada
- Prof Yoram Rudy, Washington University of St Louis, USA
- Prof Melissa Knothe Tate, University of New South Wales, Australia
- Prof Terry Peters, Western University, Canada
- Prof Roger Kamm, MIT, USA
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