UC San Diego Ranked 14th Best University in World

LA JOLLA, CA — UC San Diego was named the 14th best university in the world Tuesday in the annual Academic Ranking of World Universities.

The list by China's ShanghaiRanking Consultancy emphasizes the quality of faculty and research.
UCSD's ranking has held steady at No. 14 the past four years.

Harvard ranked as the world's best university, followed by Stanford and UC Berkeley.

San Diego State University was lumped into a category between 401 and 500 where the schools were listed alphabetically.

Among the criteria were the number of:

— alumni who won the Nobel Prize or Fields Medal;
— faculty who earned the Nobel Prize or Fields Medal;
— highly cited researchers in 21 broad subject categories;
— papers published in the journals Nature and Science;
— papers indexed in Science Citation Index-expanded and Social Science Citation Index; and
— per capita academic performance of an institution.

The ARWU ranked more than 1,200 universities and published the top 500.

Nationally, UCSD was named the country’s 12th best university.

"UC San Diego’s culture of innovation, collaboration and risk-taking has once again earned the university global praise as one of the best in the world," said Chancellor Pradeep Khosla. "We are honored to be recognized as a leading university that recruits exceptional scholars and generates quality research that benefits our global society."

Additionally, UC San Diego was recently ranked the 17th best university in the world by the Center for World University Rankings and it took the 35th spot in the Times Higher Education World Reputation Rankings.

Recent research advances at UC San Diego include:

• Developing a temporary tattoo that can save your life. UC San Diego’s new technology measures blood alcohol level from sweat and transmits the data wirelessly to your smart phone or laptop, which could prevent intoxicated drivers from hitting the road.
• Studying how the brain’s stopping system derails a train of thought may give insight into Parkinson’s disease.
• Creating a new method to measure and monitor the contribution of human activities to warming the surface waters of the Pacific Ocean, providing more means to measure society’s success in keeping temperatures from rising to catastrophic levels.
• Developing a new method to monitor the brain activity of a fruit fly while it is social––a breakthrough for neuroscience research that could lead to a better understanding of the human brain and its disorders.
• Designing an innovative new model to arrest pancreatic cancer growth. The most common form of Pancreatic Cancer has a 5-year survival rate of just 6 percent.

More information on the Academic Ranking of World Universities available here.

— City News Service contributed to this report.

(Photo: Znode via Wikimedia Commons)