Our Research Beacons are cross-disciplinary areas of excellence that bring together inspiring researchers to address grand challenges.
Developing our successful research community
World-changing Glasgow. Our people have always been at the forefront of innovation. Our past achievements inspire our current world-changers.
1776 – Adam Smith publishes The Wealth of Nations
1848 – Lord Kelvin proposes an absolute scale of temperature, now called the Kelvin Scale
1867 – Joseph Lister publishes research on the use of antiseptic in surgery
1879 – first successful removal of a brain tumour by William Macewen
1895 – Sir William Ramsay discovers helium
1896 – John Macintyre opens the world’s first x-ray department
1898 – Sir William Ramsay discovers neon, krypton and xenon
1913 – Frederick Soddy discovers isotopes
1926 – John Logie Baird invents television
1936 – John Boyd Orr publishes link between poverty, poor diet and ill health
1958 – Ian Donald shows the world the first ultrasound image of a foetus
1958 – discovery of first beta-blocking drug to treat coronary heart disease by Sir James Black
1967 – Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovers radio pulsars
1974 – Graham Teasdale and Bryan Jennett create the Glasgow Coma Scale
1995 – James Shepherd leads a landmark study on use of statins to prevent heart attacks
2009 – A team of Glasgow researchers, led by Christian Kay, publishes the world’s first Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary
2010 – Keith Muir leads the first fully regulated clinical trial of stem cell therapy for stroke patients
2015 – Sheila Rowan leads the Glasgow team that first detected gravitational waves
