Informatics is one of seven schools in the College of Science and Engineering, at the University of Edinburgh. We are the only School in the College of Science and Engineering that is not located on the King's Buildings campus, but rather in the Central area, thus allowing us to foster networks beyond the usual tech links.

Vision

Our vision at the School of Informatics is to retain and strengthen our position among the top five world-leading centres of research and teaching in computation, information and cognition.

Excellence in research

The School of Informatics has surpassed expectations in producing its best ever assessment result in the Research Excellence Framework (REF).

The REF assesses both research outputs (such as scientific papers) and the research environment as previously considered by the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), last conducted in 2008. The REF also evaluates the impact of research, which was not considered by the RAE. In addition to improving its assessment scores across the board compared to RAE 2008, the School also produced excellent impact from its research.

REF 2014 Overall results

The School of Informatics submitted more FTE staff than any other school or department of Computer Science. With a submission of 94.85 FTE staff, we were more than 20 FTE larger than the nearest competitor (Oxford, with 73.40 FTE staff).

• 33% of our research outputs received the top grade (4*).
• 48% of our impact case studies received the top grade.
• 60% of our research environment received the top grade.
• 40% of our REF submission overall received the top grade.