A map of UCL Faculty of Life Sciences research between January 2021 and May 2026. We pulled every FLS-led paper from OpenAlex (3,967 papers from 4,055 authors), embedded each one with a model trained on scientific paper similarity (SPECTER2), and clustered the embeddings to surface natural groupings — without reference to the existing divisional structure.
Two views are available:
- Broad view — 8 areas — trunk-level clusters spanning neuroscience, structural biology, genetics, ecology, pharmaceutics, pharmacy practice and cell biology.
- Detailed view — 20 communities — branch-level clusters surfacing cross-divisional communities such as cellular neuroscience (NPP, SWC and Gatsby) and structural molecular biology (Biosciences and Pharmacy).
Hover any point for paper details. Search an author’s name to highlight their papers across the map. Click a cluster card to isolate it.
Cluster word clouds
Eight broad research areas at the trunk level — K=8 is the clearest segmentation of the FLS corpus, sitting at the global minimum of the Bayesian information criterion with the highest silhouette score across all values tested. Words are sized by TF-IDF weight (how distinctive they are to that cluster), not raw frequency.
Snapshot: May 2026.