My role in the Global Engagement Office (GEO) involves mapping UCL’s collaborations around the world, to help us tell our global story better. But as you can imagine at a university of UCL’s size, this is no mean feat!

Thanks to the work of the many academics collaborating internationally who have shared details of their work with GEO, we’ve been able to compile an interactive dashboard showcasing some of this activity.

You can take a look around the dashboard, created in Tableau public, here.

The motivation behind this new resource is to show the collaborations that GEO is aware of UCL having in certain countries. It is arranged by UCL faculty.

For example, let’s say we want to use the dashboard to find out what collaborations UCL has in Brazil.

We just select ‘Brazil’ on the right hand side, then we can see in the matrix below the map the faculties and departments that collaborate in Brazil, while in the rows we’ll see the Brazilian institutions that we collaborate with, as shown in the image here:

We can see that GEO is aware of UCL’s School of European Languages, Culture and Society (SELCS) in the Faculty of Arts & Humanities having a collaboration with the “Casa de Rui Barbosa Foundation.”

Another way the dynamic dashboard can be used is by navigating by Faculty. For example, let’s have look into Brain Sciences. If we select the faculty on the left hand side, we can can see the location of their collaborations:

We’re keen to keep this dashboard as up to date as possible, so if you are a UCL academic collaborating with colleagues overseas and you can’t find your work listed here, please contact me and we can add this in.

Alejandro is GEO’s Strategic Data Manager. Through analysis of the various databases that UCL uses and produces, Alejandro monitors the levels, patterns and progress of global activity underway across the university, which helps track delivery of the Global Engagement Strategy. He tells us more about his work and reveals some interesting statistics about UCL’s collaborations abroad.

Tell us more about your role in GEO
My role is to map UCL’s relationship with the world, one map at a time. The idea is that we have a database into how we interact across the globe, for example: How many students from Japan study in UCL? How may UCL graduates work in South Africa? How do we make an impact on South America rural areas? How many collaborations do we have with American Universities? Answering those questions is broadly speaking my role.

How could you be of support to UCL staff outside of GEO?
If there is a question as to what UCL is doing in certain geographical areas, or where we are collaborating with a specific institution, that is a query I can help with. Let’s assume an academic is travelling to Colombia for a conference: he could contact us and we could let him know which other academics have links in the country. That way he would be aware of UCL’s relationship with Colombia and know more about the specifics of collaborating there from first-hand experience.

Could you share some interesting statistics on UCL’s global activity we might not ordinarily be aware of?
Sure, below is a sample showing our wide geographical reach in terms of institutions we have collaborated with. UCL has collaborated with around 1,000 institutions worldwide.

Also, since I am from Mexico, here you can see the places where Mexican institutions have downloaded UCL e-books though JStor:

What are you working on at the moment?
I’m working on mapping the collaborations that UCL has with China, and which faculties collaborate in which city:

Contact Alejandro on:

a.moreno@ucl.ac.uk
+44 (0)20 3108 7789 / internal 57789