With 14 Nobel Prize winners among its alumni, Imperial College London (Imperial) has established itself as a science powerhouse of the last century.

Founded when several colleges in London merged in 1907, Imperial has made its name in the world of science, technology, medicine, and business, and remains one of the top-rated universities in both the UK and globally.

Its permeation into public consciousness is noted by Imperial's CIO, Jenny Rae, who notes the university has some 250,000 alumni. “I find that whenever I go to an event or something, I meet people who either went to Imperial or know someone who did. It’s fascinating hearing people’s stories,” she tells DCD.

It is immediately striking that Rae is very enthusiastic about both her role, and Imperial as a whole.

While she’s been at Imperial for close to four years - two as CIO - Rae’s career didn’t find its footing in higher education, or even in IT.

She studied for a business degree, and while she notes that there were some modules that covered things like “management information systems” and touched on IT, it wasn’t until a placement year at Microsoft that she caught the technology “bug.”

“At the time, technology wasn’t a ‘big thing’ for women,” she recalls. “There weren’t many women going into it; it was seen as quite a male-dominated field, but I went to Microsoft as a project manager and really got the bug for it because I just saw what technology could do for businesses, how it could transform things.”

After she graduated, Microsoft offered her a full-time job.

“I had the opportunity at Microsoft to teach myself quite a lot while I was there,” Rae says. “I was surrounded by technologists, so as a graduate I could say to people, ‘can we grab a coffee and talk about your technology?’ I loved that I was the bit between the business and the technology, that I got to join the two and be that conduit.”

In the years since, Rae has taken jobs at BT, Vodafone, and satellite firm OneWeb, among others, before she stumbled across a job advertised at Imperial, a role she thought was “too good an opportunity to pass up.”

She explains: “I got the director of digital products role, which was to come in and change the way they were working to a product-led approach. Then I had the chance to go for the CIO role, and I applied for it,” she says. And, as the cliche goes, the rest is history.

Entering Imperial

Rae’s initial role came out of necessity for the university as it adjusted to the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.

“The IT organization had a bit of a reset under the previous CIO, but it was in a position where, now that it had been reorganized and restructured, we needed to change the way we were working, and it moved to a ‘product’ operating model,” she explains.

Rae contrasts this to a ‘project’-led approach, which she’d employed in previous roles.

She recalls: “We’d have a set of requirements from the business, and you’d almost chuck them at the wall and get to work. The technology teams would disappear for six months, and come back, and the business would say, ‘that’s no good anymore, that’s not going to work.’ There was a real separation between the two teams.”

Rae says she had been reading up about the product-led approaches being adopted by software companies that were maturing in the early 2000s, and was keen to implement it with her own team. She says: “The question then becomes, how do you bring a product-led approach to the IT department? Previously, you’d have different teams working on different things - it wouldn’t be linked, and they worked in silos. You never really had the continuity of building up the understanding of the organization.”

A product-led approach puts an emphasis on collaboration as an enabler to deliver a better end-product, along with iterative development to refine processes. Rae uses the example of Imperial’s digital campus team, which works closely with the organization’s property teams. “They really build knowledge and understanding of the business, organization, and property. What that enables is a common road map that we can all work on together,” she explains, later adding that the strategy means “you iterate and deliver value frequently.”

This element of our conversation serves to highlight the business understanding Rae brings to her role.

Imperial is a non-profit organization and an institute of higher education, but it still has to be run with a business-like mindset. This becomes all the more clear when discussing the university’s IT estate, which is varied and disparate.

With a business that has been around for several decades, establishing a cohesive and congruent IT footprint is a key task. Legacy IT often lingers, and things can get a little complicated. Imperial is no different.

“We have a bit of a mix,” Rae explains.

The nitty-gritty of IT infrastructure

On the enterprise side, Imperial has “a reasonably sized legacy IT estate,” some of which the university is seeking to move to the cloud. One such example that has been moved is the university’s finance, HR, and research administration data, which now uses Oracle Fusion, and has adopted some Microsoft platforms.

“We are looking at what we can move to the cloud to help with the running of the businesses,” explains Rae, adding that, currently, “We do still have legacy services that run from an on-prem data center. We also lease some colo space, so we have a bit of a mix.”

On the colo side, Imperial leases space at the Virtus’ London 4 data center and other unnamed facilities.

As a university, and one with a focus on science, the IT estate also includes hardware for research and high-performance computing (HPC).

“The baseline of the menu is that everything has to be compliant, and we have to protect Imperial from a cyber perspective,” Rae says. “There are some centralized offerings, there’s the option to have something and run it yourself elsewhere, or the middle ground, which a lot do, where researchers use our data centers for their servers.”

Beyond that, the university’s research computing team offers access to centralized HPC clusters for academics and researchers at the university, though these pale in comparison to some of the fastest computers in the world that feature in the Top500 list.

According to the specifications documentation, Imperial is operating two Nvidia-powered clusters - CX3 and HX1.

CX3 is the primary cluster, with a total of 408 nodes, 48,384 cores, 717.5 TB RAM, 56 L40S, and 88 Quadro (Turing) RTX 6000s, while HX1 has 303 compute nodes, 19,512 cores, 159 TB of RAM, and 60 A100 GPUs. For comparison, the world’s most powerful supercomputers are operating with cores in the millions.

Overall, the UK has some ground to make up when it comes to supercomputers. The UK’s most powerful machine, the recently-launched Isambard-AI supercomputer at the University of Bristol, has more than a million cores, and a peak performance of 278.58 petaflops and 23 exaflops of AI performance, placing it at number 11 on the latest Top500 list.

The second most powerful supercomputer in the UK is Archer, housed at the University of Edinburgh, shortly followed by the Dawn system, with around 20 petaflops of compute, at the University of Cambridge.

North of the border, the University of Edinburgh does seem - tentatively - to be on course to establish an even more powerful supercomputer for the UK. Originally planned to be the country's first exascale supercomputer, the £1.3bn ($1.66bn) project was shelved in August 2024 by the government due to a lack of available public funding.

The government recommitted to the project in June of this year, though it is now described as a £750m ($1bn) project. Thus far, the Scottish university has already spent £31 million ($42m) on a new building to house the supercomputer, and hopes to have the new machine up and running by 2027.

When DCD raised the topic of the government’s yo-yo approach to a new supercomputer, Rae conceded that it was a sector-wide issue with “changes in government and where grants and funding are available.”

She later adds: “It makes it very uncertain and, ultimately, we are a charity. We aren’t for-profit; our strategy is focused on “Science for Humanity,” which is a fantastic purpose, but in a more commercial organization, perhaps you could take risks that aren't possible in a sector where it's harder to bring in funding.”

Despite this, Rae is optimistic about the UK government’s attitude towards new technologies. In July 2025 alone, the government committed to spending £1 billion ($1.36bn) scaling up the nation's compute power "by a factor of 20,” and several efforts to bring in external investment in the UK’s technology have been made since Labour was voted in.

While Imperial remains at the forefront of science and technology in lots of ways, the university isn’t directly involved in quantum computing as yet - or at least, the operation of quantum computers.

Imperial has a center for quantum engineering, science, and technology, dubbed “QuEST” which brings together multiple faculties and looks at how quantum can have practical uses. Despite this, the university does not have its own quantum computer.

This is by no means unusual - quantum computers are still very much in a nascent phase, and while a few higher education institutions have deployed physical systems, it remains rare.

Explaining the thought process behind purchasing - or not purchasing - a quantum computer, Rae explains: “If I look at Imperial as a business, it has some 8,500 staff, 23,000 students and a quarter million alumni. It's like a good-sized FTSE company, and we turn over around £1.2bn ($1.6bn) a year. If I look at that, I have to ask, ‘what’s quantum going to bring Imperial in terms of managing that business?’ And that’s quite a hard business case at the moment.”

The nature of a university means that a role like CIO can be complicated and diverse, covering enterprise operations' needs and research capabilities, and dealing with thousands of staff, many of whom have strong opinions. But Rae takes this in her stride.

“You've got lots of different minds coming together, lots of different views, and therefore, you get a real kind of input to the problems and the opportunities we've got in front of ourselves,” she says. “You get that kind of diversity, and I think the really big thing is the purpose. It comes back to that Science for Humanity strategy we're working towards.

“It's not about making money, and it really shows that Imperial people are always raising the bar and genuinely in search of excellence, whether that's excellence in teaching or research, and that is brilliant.”