A leading research-intensive university, the University of Birmingham is a vibrant, global community and an internationally-renowned institution, in the top 20 in the UK and 100 globally. With approximately 28,000 students and 6,000 members of staff, its work brings people from more than 150 countries to Birmingham.
The University of Birmingham has been challenging and developing great minds for more than a century. Characterised by a tradition of innovation, research at Birmingham has broken new ground, pushed forward the boundaries of knowledge and made an impact on people’s lives.
We continue this tradition today and have ambitions for a future that will embed our work and recognition of the Birmingham name on the international stage.
Universities are never complete. They develop as new challenges and opportunities occur. At the University of Birmingham we innovate, we push the frontiers of understanding; we ask new research questions, we turn theory through experiment into practice – because that’s what great universities do.
Ethical issues are rife in medicine. Arguments about abortion, organ donation and euthanasia regularly take their turn in the headlines, normally prompted by media scare-stories or an arising controversy…
David Cameron plunged into the criminal punishment debate recently by throwing his support around proposals to impose incredibly long sentences (100 years or so) for some murders as a way to circumvent…
George Osborne has warned that a further £25bn of spending cuts will be needed after the next election – with about half of those cuts to be made from the social security budget, largely from cuts in benefits…
For 20 privileged Victorians, Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins held a lavish New Year’s dinner party in 1853 inside a model of a dinosaur that was created for the Great Exhibition held two years earlier. Hawkins’s…
Scientists in France have found how the genes of the malaria parasite adapt to become resistant to artemisinin, one of the most effective remaining antimalarial drugs. Their discovery exposes a serious…
Fossils can tell us lots about animals – their size, age or sex, which is mostly physical characteristics. Evidence about how they may have behaved is rare. But the 240m-year-old fossil dung that I found…
The labour market has shown some signs of recovery in the past year and the unemployment rate has fallen to 7.6%. While this appears to be a positive sign the reality is that many people with jobs are…
True democracy is not just about casting a vote every five years. It means citizens being fully involved in the proposal, development and creation of laws. The Commission on Digital Democracy currently…
Is a car-free city possible? In many European cities walking and cycling already account for more than half of all journeys. In Britain, the Sustainable Travel Demonstration Towns project between 2004-08…
Sometimes it seems you’ve only got to turn around and there is another drug in the news. Now we are told that ketamine should be upgraded from being a Class C drug to a Class B drug. Why does this matter…
The death last night of Nelson Mandela serves as a reminder of the enormous potential of African leaders to bring positive and lasting change to the continent. It is a reminder also of the obligations…
There is increasing talk of electrification of the UK’s railway network. But electrification is an expensive business, requiring much new hardware including masts, wiring, substations and so on. Such an…
Signed by the P5 + Germany and mediated by the EU’s foreign policy chief, Baroness Catherine Ashton, the deal achieved with Iran on the latter’s nuclear programme has important implications for regional…
The nuclear deal reached between the United States and Iran represents both a breakthrough and a risk for Barack Obama. A breakthrough because it stalls Iran’s progress towards nuclear weapons capability…
Despite significant progress over time, we still know very little about what works to improve people’s health in some areas of healthcare – but we suspect that some things need to be very tailored to the…
The government of the Central African Republic claims to be in talks with one of the world’s most enigmatic African guerrilla leaders, Joseph Kony. But Kony has entered talks before with no intention of…
At a meeting at the Wall Street Journal this week, Martin E Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, noted that the United States’ ability to exercise influence in the Middle East had significantly…
The recent publication of the government’s strategic case for HS2 has added to mounting concerns about the strength and validity of evidence put forward to support the project. Previously, the business…
Next year, high-speed rail travel will celebrate its 50th birthday. In 1964, Japan put into service the first Shinkansen line, from Tokyo to Osaka. Its trains initially operated at speeds of up to 210…
Quantum mechanics has been hailed as the next big thing in technology. And quantum computers are a media favourite. But there is a little-known quantum technology that can peer beneath the earth, which…