These eight characteristics are brought to life by our academic and professional staff and research students.

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Transcript

Professor Kate McGrath: Our new research strategy will see that our research is characterised by eight separate things. We have a range of things that we really want to be known for as a university, starting, of course, with excellence. We want to ensure that everything that we do is from a foundation of driving excellence – our people, our systems – and what this allows us to do is be more aspirational and more inspirational about what we can actually achieve from our research.

We also recognise, well, hey, we are the University of Technology Sydney, so we want to be leaders in the creation, the use, the leadership of what it is to actually use technology in today’s practice, and how do you do that in a really responsible way?

These are really the two most critical things for us: excellence and that fundamental context of technology. But we have many others as well: We’re creative. We want to ensure that we’re connected to our creative and professional practice people. We also know that it’s really important that we think about our focus and distinction. We can’t be everything for everyone.

So, we’re also exploring, how do we define what we’re really good at? What makes us distinct, what makes us different, what makes industry, governments, communities want to come and work for us because they know that in these particular areas, they’ll be able to tap into us in an agile, responsive way and start creating solutions?

So, we have eight different characteristics. Explore them at your leisure and you’ll see exactly what it is we’re going to achieve as a research university.

Download the UTS Research Strategy (pdf, 503kb)

How individuals work, are motivated, define their aspirations and build their careers are embedded into how we create and deliver excellence in research support.

Research characteristic 1Excellence
We inspire our people to be excellent, producing outstanding research that is supported by our integrated physical and digital research infrastructure and research support services.
research characteristic 2Technology
We use, define, create, challenge and provide responsible leadership through our researchers’ understanding in tackling the implications of the use of technology in society.
research characteristic 3Meeting societal and industry needs
We are responsive to identifying and creating solutions for the complex challenges facing society and industry today, while also working to shape what the future can be locally, nationally and globally.
research characteristic 4Focus and distinction
We build depth, make connections and achieve scale and impact through the fuller understanding of our capabilities across our people and digital and physical
infrastructure. We continue to focus on areas aligned to our strategy and through which we can deliver distinct value.
research characteristic 5Connectedness
We communicate, connect and collaborate with each other, our academic, community, industry and government partners and the world at large to bring together diverse capabilities and expertise. This creates scale with shared visions and outcomes.
research characteristic 6Valuing and utilising our discipline diversity and trans-disciplinary capabilities
We integrate and mobilise our capabilities across disciplines to solve challenges that transcend boundaries. This creates a shared literacy and understanding of research methods that amplifies our deep disciplinary knowledge and the capabilities of our individual researchers. We enhance this by drawing value from the use of multi and transdisciplinary practice, strong connections between humanities and social sciences (HASS) and science, technology, engineering and medicine (STEM) and embedded capabilities such as data science and analytics or sustainability.
research characteristic 7Creativity
We draw on our culture of creativity along with our capabilities in, and connections to, creative and professional practice. This enhances our expertise in leading practice-based research and ability to rapidly translate research outcomes into practice.
research characteristic 8Interrelated research and teaching
We ensure that our teaching, learning and research practices are connected and mutually enhanced through these connections. We support the development of our academic staff, professional staff and graduate research students through the application of our strengths in pedagogy to all of our research-focused professional development opportunities.

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