David Price

UCL, which describes itself as “London’s Global University” and “London’s Research Powerhouse”, has 9,600 research and academic staff across a breadth of academic disciplines. In the most recent (2014) Research Excellence Framework, UCL came top in 'research power' – the overall quality of its submission (the 'grade point average' multiplied by the full-time equivalent number of researchers submitted – not only in the overall results, but in each of the three assessed elements: publications and other outputs; research environment; and research impact. UCL's income from research grants and contracts in 2017-18 was £476.3 million.

In the Foreword to the 2019 UCL Research Strategy, Price wrote: “Regrettably, the key question for our generation of researchers has become: ‘How will society survive to the 22nd century?’ By survival, we do not mean simply the continued existence of the human race, but also of the environments, institutions, structures and values that underpin and enhance society and enable humanity to thrive. We also recognise the profound imperative to tackle the persistent injustices and inequalities in society today, and to help to deliver a more equitable future for all of humanity. … UCL is well-positioned to make major contributions to help humanity survive and prosper. This is due not least to our distinctive ability to sustain a breadth, depth and diversity of expertise and research across disciplines and methods. The purpose of this strategy is to enable UCL’s individual researchers and our research community as a whole to maximise their contribution to public good. I believe this also requires us to consider: how our research environment supports our researchers, both as individuals and collectively; the cultural and structural barriers we may need to overcome to achieve our ambitions; and how we can redefine traditional concepts of leadership, collaboration and research impact to reflect, enable and drive the vision, aims and objectives set out in this strategy."

Price distinguished cross-disciplinarity – "between experts in different disciplines, transcending subject boundaries" – from "interdisciplinary generalism". The Times Higher Education article stated: "Cross-disciplinary collaboration did not necessarily happen "naturally", and this was where Professor Price's office justified its existence - by organising symposia, offering seed funding and even establishing cross-disciplinary institutes. "Some universities believe that just having excellence and enough people together [means] it will all happen. I believe excellence is a key thing, but you need also to give people a framework...to refer back to," he said. He said his approach was not "dirigiste", but that he hoped to create an ethos of collegiality in which collaboration became the norm. ... "I am very happy to leave excellent people to get on alone, but we are providing them with an opportunity to do more." This was an opportunity that increasing numbers of UCL academics were taking up".

Price also conceived the UCL Grand Challenges – Global Health, Sustainable Cities, Intercultural Interaction and Human Wellbeing – through which concentrations of specialist expertise are brought together to address aspects of the world's key problems. The following were flagship UCL Grand Challenges initiatives:

The strategy sets out a number of objectives in support of an overall aspiration: "We want to stimulate disruptive thinking across and beyond our university to transform knowledge and understanding, and to tackle complex societal problems. We wish to help to enable society not only to survive to the next century – an urgent challenge requiring unprecedented collective action and partnership – but also to thrive, so that the lives of future generations are worth living: prosperous, secure, engaged, empowered, fair, healthy, stimulating and fulfilling. As a community of scholars and those who support them, we must each focus our efforts, based on our founding values and driven by our intellectual curiosity, to be a force for positive social change. … This strategy seeks to enable and empower all our researchers to thrive as research leaders, providing opportunities for engagement and impact, while ensuring that they retain the freedom to steer their own course, experiment and develop in unique ways. We see this as crucial in order to maintain the richness and diversity of research at UCL."

After publication of the 2011 version of the UCL Research Strategy, Times Higher Education described Price as asserting that "since the Thatcher era, universities had adopted the prevailing political view of them as "the engines of the knowledge economy", leading them to neglect wisdom, which he defined as "the judicious application of knowledge for the good of humanity". He cited the huge increase in maize prices prompted by the staple food crop's use as a source of biofuel as a "classic case of the application of very clever knowledge without developing a wise way of introducing it". The problem, he said, was that few universities possessed the breadth of top researchers necessary to generate wisdom, which required the "synthesising and contrasting of the knowledge, perspectives and methodologies of different disciplines"."

Price has led the development of three iterations of the UCL Research Strategy, in 2008, 2011 and 2019.

In 2008, Price devised and introduced the first-ever UCL research strategy, Maximizing Impact and Influence Globally. It stated: “[I]n the recent past, universities have not been seen major forces for social change. UCL’s new research strategy will help realise the radical vision of its founders, who, following [Jeremy] Bentham, believed that education, and hence universities, were the key to reform. … With its unique strengths and position, UCL has an opportunity and an obligation to develop and disseminate original knowledge to help provide solutions to the grand challenges faced by the world today and tomorrow.”

Upon appointment in 2007, Price said: “UCL is a world-class centre for research, and it is my aim to help develop an environment in which the research community here can grow and achieve still greater levels of excellence. UCL has global expertise across the entire spectrum of academia, and researchers here are uniquely placed to provide solutions to major international problems, such as global health, the development of the urban environment and intercultural understanding. I hope to enable the study of such interdisciplinary problems, which consequently will allow UCL to continue to make a global and national contribution to scholarship and to provide solutions to real-world issues.”

In 1983, Price became a Royal Society University Research Fellow at UCL, where he has since held a variety of academic and management positions. He discovered the mineral wadsleyite, which is believed to make up part of the transition zone of the Earth’s mantle, from a depth of 400 km to 550 km.

From 1977 to 1980, he was a Natural Environment Research Council Research Student at the University of Cambridge, and received a PhD in 1981; his doctoral thesis was entitled Aspects of Transformation Behaviour in Olivine, Pyroxenes and Titanomagnetites. From 1980 to 1981, Price was a Fulbright-Hayes Scholar and Research Associate at the University of Chicago’s Department of the Geophysical Sciences, and, from 1981 to 1983, a Research Fellow at Clare College, University of Cambridge and Natural Environment Research Council Research Fellow, University of Cambridge Department of Earth Sciences.

In 1974, prior to going to university, Price was an Assistant Scientific Officer at the National Physical Laboratory, Teddington, UK, researching dispersive Fourier transform spectroscopy. At the University of Cambridge, Price read Natural Sciences and graduated with a 1st Class Honours Bachelor of Arts from Clare College in 1977.

Geoffrey David Price FGS (born 12 January 1956) has been Vice-Provost (Research) of UCL (University College London) since 2007 and Professor of Mineral Physics in the UCL Department of Earth Sciences since 1991.