Teaching & Research

The key benefit of the education provided to our students at Queens’ is personalised teaching and direct contact with Fellows mainly through supervisions and the tutorial system. Fellows, and their research, as well as the students themselves, benefit enormously from this close exchange.

Some Fellows are University Teaching Officers, paid primarily by the University. Others are College Teaching Officers whose salaries, covering both teaching and research, are met wholly by the College. Currently the burden of funding teaching is shifting more and more from the University to the Colleges and any College that wishes to maintain high standards in teaching will hire more of its own teaching officers.

Queens’ has identified the recruitment of seven College Fellow Teaching Officers in various subjects as a fundraising priority and welcomes your support with large or small gifts. The College would be happy to have these Fellowships named by major donors.

To give you an idea of the amounts involved, the costs of funding a College Fellow Teaching Officer are:
Per annum for a minimum of 5 years - £60,000 pa (£300,000 total)
Capital Endowment - £1.7 million (Stipend, Pension, National Insurance, Commons, Rent, Utilities and Council Tax)
        
As a practical and achievable alternative the College encourages discussions with donors to fund and name University Teaching Fellowships for academics who are not resident in College, but are linked specifically with a Fellowship at Queens’, at a capital endowment cost of £500,000 each.

  
An exciting example of innovation in Teaching and Research is the recent appointment of Dr Andrew Rice to the Queens’ Fellowship. Andrew is a University Teaching Officer and Assistant Director of Research at the Cambridge University Computer Laboratory where his field is “Computing for the Future of the Planet”. He brings to Queens' an expertise second to none along with an infectious enthusiasm to inspire our students.
  
Cambridge teaching is at its best when done by academics researching in their subject.  All of our Fellows and Graduate Students must therefore be leaders in their field and actively engaged in research, which is also important for advancing their careers. Queens’ is therefore committed to supporting the research of our Fellows and Graduate Students at a recurrent total target cost of £200,000 pa.
  
An instance of outstanding support for research was the legacy left to the College by Dr Stephen Erskine (1970) to fund a Fellowship to study consciousness in the human brain. This is ground-breaking research of the kind that puts Cambridge at the forefront of medical science and it is possible as the result of the generosity of a Member of Queens’.