GIFT city campus a ‘significant investment’: Queen’s University Pro VC

QUB – the first UK university to set up an international branch campus in GIFT City starting January 2026 – will launch two dedicated Masters programmes in Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the second cohort. They will be launched in September 2026. It would also be the first international campus by QUB ever. Founded in 1845 as Queen’s College Belfast, it became an independent university in 1908. It is one of the oldest universities in the UK and Ireland. QUB will be the largest foreign university in GIFT City, launching with 200-250 seats across three Masters programmes.

“There are two programmes we’re proposing to offer with an Artificial Intelligence focus. One course is AI for computer science students, very much on the technical side, and the other is AI for Business. While the first would look into the technology aspect, the second will look at how businesses engage with, interact with and introduce ethical frameworks around the use of AI in the business sector. We would be hoping to recruit up to 80 to 100 for each of those courses with a similar fee structure,” Prof Topping said.

The three Masters programmes to be launched in January 2026 are Construction and Project Management, Business Analytics and Financial Analytics, AI programmes are MSc in Artificial Intelligence and an MSc Artificial Intelligence for Business.

In the backdrop of the Indo-UK vision 2035, Prof Topping, who was a part of the delegation led by the UK Prime Minister a few weeks ago in Mumbai, said she can see universities are being placed as key levers to achieve some of those ambitions. “It was very clear that education, at all levels, was front and centre there, and in the universities and the role of UK universities coming in and being partners of Indian universities, partners with companies, was heartening, it was very much at the forefront of our discussions there. So, I think we want to build on that positivity as well and see this again, not just as an educational offering, but as an ambition to be part of the ambitious plans for the future.”

Having completed the faculty appointments, QUB is looking at recruiting the support staff for its offshore campus. “The faculty appointments are over. We have 12 academic faculty staff which is a mix of both national and international faculty members. We have one from South Africa, Australia. We have people who have done their PhDs in Ireland, and people who have worked in other countries. So they’re all coming back to work with us. So a nice international perspective which is going to expand as well as we will be appointing more academic staff in the coming months as we seek to grow the number of programmes. At the moment, we’re focussing on our wider support staff, bringing them on board in the next month or so,” Prof M Satish Kumar, Dean of Queen’s University’s GIFT City told The Indian Express.

This will be the largest international branch campus in GIFT City with an estimated 1,45,000 sq ft ten-floor building. The campus building will be ready for a full handover by December end. The building will have floors which are dedicated to teaching, research students and an innovation centre. While this is the first ‘significant’ campus in India, QUB also has a presence in China, in collaboration with a university. It is not a branch campus, but an arrangement for pharmacy programmes.

Claiming that QUB has an edge over other foreign universities, Topping said, “Queen’s University is part of the prestigious Russell Group, which is among the top research universities in the UK. What that means in terms of even our Master’s delivery is that students are taught by research leaders and that has an inevitable influence on the quality of the teaching experience. It is about the quality of the staff that we have, the quality of the teaching, the students coming into an environment where there will be research activity going on. As a Russell group, we’re also able to leverage partnerships with industry in different ways because in engaging with industry we will be bringing our own research and development capability to develop. A lot of the conversation we’ve had in the last few days has been what are your R&D needs. A lot of universities are not going to be able to offer that.”

Every single student will have the opportunity to study an additional professional qualification alongside their Masters, have access to industry and have the ability to work collaboratively with students on the other side of the world on an enterprise-type project, she added.