UC San Diego Named World’s 14th Best University for Fourth Consecutive Year

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The University of California San Diego has been named the 14th best university in the world for the fourth year in a row by the 2016 Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU). The campus was named the world's third best public college and nationally, UC San Diego 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,” Chancellor Pradeep K. Khosla said. “We are honored to be recognized as a leading university that recruits exceptional scholars and generates quality research that benefits our global society.”

The ARWU rankings were recently released by the Center for World-Class Universities at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, a public research university located in Shanghai, renowned as one of the most prestigious universities in China.

According to ARWU, the rankings are based on six objective indicators including the number of alumni and staff winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals, the number of highly cited researchers, the number of articles published in journals of Nature and Science, the number of articles indexed in Science Citation Index - Expanded and Social Sciences Citation Index and per capita performance.

More than 1,200 universities are actually ranked by ARWU every year and the best 500 universities are published.

The rankings cement UC San Diego’s standing as a global academic powerhouse. The campus was recently ranked the 17th best university in the world by the Center for World University Rankings (CWUR) 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.

For more information on the Academic Ranking of World Universities list, click here.