About us
The Queen Square Institute of Neurology is a world-leading centre for neurological research within the UCL Faculty of Brain Sciences.
Welcome to the UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology. The Institute is an amazing place and it is my privilege to be the Director. Our aim is to discover how the brain and nervous system works and to use this knowledge to find better treatments and ways to improve the lives of patients with neurological and brain diseases. We prioritise training the next generation and we work to drive partnerships and collaborations in a culture that fully embraces the power of diversity. I hope you enjoy finding out more about our world-leading teaching and research.
Professor Michael Hanna
Institute Director
Our mission
Our mission is to translate neuroscience discovery research into treatments for patients with neurological diseases
Our aims
- a leading translational neuroscience centre in the world translating discovery into experimental studies in patients to deliver new diagnostics and new therapies;
- an excellent student destination for educational programmes embedded in translational neuroscience research;
- overcome fragmentation as a centre for connecting industry, commercial partners, academics and patients to accelerate translate research, internationally.
We have eight departments covering clinical and basic research, spanning areas that range from brain rehabilitation to neuromuscular diseases.
These include the MRC International Centre for Genomic Medicine in Neuromuscular Diseases and Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging.
Alongside our departments, we have six divisions representing professional affiliations and providing a forum for those with similar specialist training.
Our Institute in numbers
- Nearly 750 staff, including 142 principal investigators, and just under 300 honorary and visiting staff
- 280 PhD students and over 250 MSc/Diploma students
- 689 active research projects, totalling £315 million with an annual turnover of £95 million
Our history
The UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology was established in 1950 and merged with UCL in 1997.
Our unique academic health science partnerships provide us with access to a patient population of over six million, including the longest continually running major birth cohort study in the world. Our strong clinical partnership with the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery gives us a privileged understanding of how to bring a truly patient-focused approach to research, innovation and education.
In 2018, UCL was chosen as the hub of the UK Dementia Research Institute (UK DRI), the single biggest investment the UK has ever made in dementia thanks to £290 million from founding funders the Medical Research Council, Alzheimer’s Society and Alzheimer’s Research UK. The UK DRI research team are based within our Institute.
Our partnerships
Our partnerships not only help us provide the best training environments for our students, they also support the development of new clinical studies and enable patients to participate in our research. We have active collaborative research programmes across UCL and externally, including: