The University That Keeps Coming Back
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There is something worth noting about the way the University of Queensland arrived in India this week. This was not a recruitment drive dressed up as diplomacy. It was not a delegation of administrators handing out brochures and posing for photographs. It was the Chancellor and the Vice-Chancellor, together, moving through Delhi and Chennai with a very specific agenda: to go deeper with partners they already have, and to find new ones who share the same appetite for serious, sustained work.
That distinction matters. India has seen no shortage of foreign universities arrive with grand ambitions and leave with little to show for it. UQ has been doing something different for long enough that the results are no longer theoretical.
What Two Decades of Patience Looks Like
The centrepiece of UQ’s India engagement is the UQ-IITD Research Academy — a joint doctoral programme with IIT Delhi that has been running long enough to have produced 23 graduates and is currently supporting 133 doctoral researchers working across both institutions. This week, the partnership was renewed for another five years.
That is not a headline that sounds dramatic. But consider what it actually represents: two universities on opposite sides of the world, agreeing for the second or third time that the model works, that the researchers it produces are genuinely better for having worked across both systems, and that the investment is worth continuing.
Professor Deborah Terry, UQ’s President and Vice-Chancellor, watched doctoral researchers present their work at a Research Showcase during the visit. The range of what she saw — energy and sustainability, digital technologies, health and biomedical sciences — was, she said, a demonstration of what deep, sustained collaboration actually looks like when it is given time to develop.
“UQ’s partnerships in India are not simply about generating excellent research outputs,” she said. “They are also about creating a pipeline of globally connected researchers, equipped to work across borders, across disciplines, and across sectors.”
That pipeline is already producing people. More than 200 students from SRMIST and VIT Chennai combined have already moved through to UQ via existing pathway agreements — real students, completing real degrees, building real connections between two countries that have every reason to be closer than they are.
The Man Who Built the Bridge
The visit carried a particular significance for one member of the delegation. For Peter Varghese, UQ’s Chancellor, this trip to India was his last in that role — a final official engagement before the conclusion of a tenure that has been defined, in no small part, by his commitment to the Australia-India relationship.
Varghese is not a typical university chancellor. Before taking the role at UQ, he served as Australia’s High Commissioner to India and as Secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade — the most senior position in Australia’s diplomatic service. He has spent decades arguing, in rooms where it mattered, that India deserves to be at the centre of Australia’s strategic thinking, not at its edges.
That argument has slowly been winning. And universities, Varghese believes, are where the most durable parts of that relationship get built.
“India is a key partner for Australia — and universities are central to this relationship,” he said during the visit. “Building capability, driving discovery, and fostering the enduring people-to-people links that support long-term, sustainable collaboration.”
People-to-people links. It is a phrase that gets used so often in diplomatic circles that it can start to sound like filler. But UQ has nearly 3,000 alumni across India — graduates who studied in Brisbane and came home to careers in research, industry, government, and academia. Those are people who know what the institution stands for, who maintain connections with former classmates and supervisors, and who represent a kind of soft infrastructure that no memorandum of understanding can replicate.
New Agreements, Old Logic
Beyond the IITD renewal, the visit produced a new agreement with Lady Shri Ram College for Women — one of Delhi’s most respected institutions — focused on academic exchange and international learning. Meetings with IIT Madras, IDP Education, and the Asha Community Health and Development Society opened conversations about student mobility and research collaboration. An industry roundtable in Chennai brought together business leaders to talk about research translation and talent development.
UQ now holds 43 active agreements with 30 institutions across India. That breadth is unusual. Most foreign universities in India have one or two flagship partnerships that they point to repeatedly. UQ has built something wider — a network that spans Chennai and Delhi, engineering and biotechnology, undergraduate pathways and doctoral research, public health and digital technology.
The meetings with the University Grants Commission and the Office of the Principal Scientific Adviser were perhaps the least visible part of the visit but not the least important. Aligning collaboration with the priorities of India’s National Education Policy 2020 is not a formality — it is the difference between partnerships that have institutional runway and those that depend on the goodwill of individual vice-chancellors.
Why This Moment
UQ arrives in India at a moment when the relationship between the two countries is, by most measures, stronger than it has ever been. Australia and India have deepened their strategic partnership, trade ties are growing, and the two governments have made education a deliberate part of the bilateral agenda.
For UQ — ranked 42nd globally in the QS World University Rankings 2026 and named Australia’s top-ranked university in TIME Magazine’s inaugural World’s Top Universities list this year — India is not a market to be entered. It is a partnership to be deepened.
The researchers working through the UQ-IITD Academy on energy transitions and biomedical challenges are not doing work that belongs to one country. The students moving between Chennai and Brisbane are not simply getting foreign degrees. They are becoming the kind of people who can sit in a room with counterparts from a different system, a different culture, and a different set of assumptions, and still find a way to solve something together.
