The Minister for Defence Readiness and Industry, Luke Pollard MP, has today (13 July) announced the University of Liverpool will be a founding member of the Defence Universities Alliance (DUA).
The DUA will build a more strategic relationship between defence and academia in order to support UK defence in meeting the ambitions of the government's Strategic Defence Review and Defence Industrial Strategy.
As a member of this strategic network of 35 UK universities, the University will partner with the MOD, the Office of the Chief Scientific Advisor for National Security, the UK Armed Forces and the wider defence and national security sectors.
At its core the DUA will seek to enable the higher education sector to become a global leader in defence innovation. The University already undertakes a significant amount of defence-related research and has attracted over £14M of research funding over the last three financial years from UK government alone.
Our world-leading research in signal processing is vital for navigation and surveillance work. Other research takes in a range of fields, including AI, where one key focus is deep-fake detection. Our infectious diseases research includes pandemic preparedness. Meanwhile in psychology, academics are leading the way in areas such as high stakes decision-making, countering child sexual exploitation and detecting and preventing extremism.
The University of Liverpool's Professor Simon Maskell, who is Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl) funded Royal Academy of Engineering Research Chair in Information Fusion, said, "The current geo-political situation has brought into sharp relief the important role defence and national security research can and must play in keeping our nation safe. Today's announcement recognises the important and varied contributions academic colleagues at this university already make in this field and gives us an exciting opportunity to go further, playing a broader strategic role."
The DUA will also have a focus on developing students with the necessary skills for careers in defence and national security. This is an existing area of strength for the University which recently received a boost with a nearly £6M award from the MOD and Department for Education. This will see the University train over 190 additional engineering students over the next five academic years and invest in new, state-of-the-art teaching facilities.
Professor Laura Harkness, Pro-Vice Chancellor and Head of the Faculty of Science & Engineering said: "The University is already a very popular choice with both undergraduate and postgraduate applicants in defence-related fields and we were delighted at the recent funding to extend our work in this area. As a founding member of the DUA, we have an important opportunity to leverage the breadth of our defence-related expertise to shape defence and national security skills development at a national level."
Luke Pollard MP, Minister for Defence Readiness and Industry, said: "As we prepare for warfighting readiness, working with universities, students and innovators boosts skills and helps keep our country safe. The Defence Universities Alliance will create meaningful connections between students, academia and defence, boosting research, skills and defence expertise across the UK to strengthen industry. Universities play a key role in innovating and supporting defence, and the DUA helps marshal those efforts.
"In this new era of threat our £182 million defence skills package is helping to create opportunities for students, apprentices and young people, making sure our historic £298 billion defence investment is an engine for growth across the UK, and building on the more than 272,000 industry jobs supported by MOD spending."
