Imperial College London is a public research university in the United Kingdom. Its royal patron and founder, Prince Albert, envisioned an area for public education composed of the Natural History Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum, Science Museum, Royal Albert Hall and the Imperial Institute.

Today, Imperial is organised into four faculties of science, engineering, medicine and business and is consistently included among the top universities in the world. According to The New York Times, recruiters consider its students among the 10 most valued graduates in the world and Imperial faculty and alumni include 15 Nobel laureates, 2 Fields Medalists, 70 Fellows of the Royal Society, 82 Fellows of the Royal Academy of Engineering and 78 Fellows of the Academy of Medical Sciences.

Imperial is a centre of excellence for synthetic biology in the UK and is home to the Synthetic Biology Hub which is comprised of five 'branches':

• The Centre for Synthetic Biology and Innovation
• SynbiCITE
• The Foundry
• Frontiers Engineering
• The Flowers Consortium

The Centre for Synthetic Biology and Innovation is the academic branch of the Hub, undertaking basic research into developing new tools for synthetic biology such as biological part libraries, CAD software, computational models and automation. This will allow future generations to build new biology in a fast, affordable and robust manner. CSynBI is also applying synthetic biology to generate biological solutions to the worlds needs.

SynbiCITE, the Innovation and Knowledge Centre, based at Imperial aims to bridge the gap between academia and industry to speed up developments in new synthetic biology technologies. This is complemented by the DNA Synthesis and Construction Foundry, a facility that is establishing a common framework to build DNA by using an automated robotic system. The hope is that synthetic biologists will be able to scale up the volumes of DNA produced to more easily test their new function. This is further complemented by Frontiers Engineering, an initiative which is facilitating the transition from oil-based to bio-based process feed stocks.

In addition, Imperial is proud to be part of the Flowers Consortium; a collaboration between five leading UK universities which is dedicated to creating a UK Infrastructure for synthetic biology.