Research and Impact Office
Working with our researchers
Alongside teaching, one of the main areas of work undertaken by any university is research. You can work with our experts to help develop new products or processes for your organisation, develop intellectual property and help the technical aspects of your business flourish. By working with our research teams you can not only benefit your business but also give students and their professors and tutors an opportunity to see how their work can benefit the wider community. The research office teams work to support researchers across the university and can be used as a point of contact to engage with the wider research teams - if you can't find the team or expertise you are looking for contact us at RO@uhi.ac.uk .
Read short case studies of some selected previous projects.
World Class Research
We are the only university based in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. Our campus is very different from most university campuses; we offer the choice of studying at one of our 13 partner colleges and research centres and over 50 local learning centres, allowing us to cover an area that exceeds that of Belgium. Given the geographical challenges of reaching such a dispersed population, the university has become a world leader in online learning and utilising virtual classroom technology. This philosophy also pervades our research interests and connections to other academic institutions and business with extensive use of Video Conferencing to enable virtual meetings. Web-based technology also enables us more than ever before to operate in the international arena without any barriers.
Our REF2014 and REF2021 results underline our success at such an early stage of development. Our research areas increased their proportion of internationally excellent and world leading scores from 69% to 72%. UHI has consolidated its research standing and strong performance from 2014, showing improvement in several areas. This gives us a solid platform for future research development.
Read more about our REF results.
Consultancy
Differing from research in that it’s much less collaborative, you can engage our experts to work for you on a consultancy basis. By doing this, you can tap into world class expertise to help get the answers you need, all within a commercial relationship. The benefit for us is that this brings us income to help the university to expand its work.
If you also hold these values and think you can help us achieve our own goals whilst growing your own business then we would welcome the opportunity to explore a new collaboration.
Contact the Research & Enterprise Office.
Strategy
Change is all around us in many aspects of research funding, research councils, EU Framework programmes, charities, and also the vital issues of capital and infrastructure funding. These present a significant challenge to a developing institution and our Research Strategy document sets out our plan to meet these challenges.
Read our Research Impact and Knowledge Exchange Strategic Plan 2022-2025 (pdf).
Micro Strategies
The collegiate federal nature of our university means that Academic Partners have their own research strategies and micro-strategies and employ the majority of the research staff, make their own investments and exploit local autonomy in creating research activity. They are also responsible at the local level for other critical aspects of academic development such as staffing, investment, exploiting local funding and develop their own partnerships. The breadth and diversity of the university partnership adds strength and impact to our main research themes at the local level, often based on our unique regional characteristics. It permits a growing multi and cross disciplinary approach which enriches our research and allows the university to collaborate at the highest level.
This duality of operation on both a local and international scale is an incredibly powerful strength that we intend to build upon.
Further Information
The UHI Research Database has details on all our researchers, research outputs, activities and research publications. The information is drawn from our institution-wide Research Database (known to our researchers as PURE), which is updated on a daily basis by the researchers themselves giving a live and accurate record of our research capability.
To search for expertise, look for particular researchers or filter details by research area go to;