1. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) United States
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.
Founded in 1861 in response to the increasing industrialization of the United States, the institute adopted the European polytechnic university model and emphasized laboratory instruction from an early date. MIT's early emphasis on applied technology at the undergraduate and graduate levels led to close cooperation with industry, but curricular reforms under Karl Compton and Vannevar Bush in the 1930s re-emphasized basic scientific research. MIT was elected to the Association of American Universities in 1934. Researchers were involved in efforts to develop computers, radar, and inertial guidance in connection with defense research during World War II and the Cold War. Post-war defense research contributed to the rapid expansion of the faculty and campus under James Killian.
The current 168-acre (68.0 ha) campus opened in 1916 and extends over 1 mile (1.6 km) along the northern bank of the Charles River basin. In the past 60 years, MIT's educational disciplines have expanded beyond the physical sciences and engineering into fields such as biology, economics, linguistics, political science, and management.
Website - http://web.mit.edu/
2. University of California, Berkeley United States
The University of California, Berkeley (also referred to as UC Berkeley, Cal Berkeley, or just "Berkeley" or "Cal"), is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA. Berkeley is the most consistently well ranked university in the world overall as shown by a meta-analysis of subject/departmental data over the last sixteen years from the United States National Research Council, the US News & World Report, and Times Higher Education. Berkeley has the highest number of distinguished graduate programs ranked in the top 10 in their fields by the United States National Research Council. Among other honors, University faculty, alumni, and researchers have won 66 Nobel Prizes, 9 Wolf Prizes, 7 Fields Medals, 15 Turing Awards, 45 MacArthur Fellowships, 20 Academy Awards, and 11 Pulitzer Prizes. To date, UC Berkeley and its researchers are associated with 6 chemical elements of the periodic table (Californium, Seaborgium, Berkelium, Einsteinium, Fermium, Lawrencium) and Berkeley Lab has discovered 16 chemical elements in total - more than any other university in the world.
UC Berkeley is the flagship institution of the University of California. The university occupies 6,651 acres (2,692 ha) with the central campus resting on approximately 200 acres (80.9 ha) in the San Francisco Bay Area. Berkeley offers approximately 300 undergraduate and graduate degree programs in a wide range of disciplines. The oldest of the ten major campuses affiliated with the University of California (UC), Berkeley was the result of an 1868 merger of the private College of California and the public Agricultural, Mining, and Mechanical Arts College in Oakland. Since its founding, Berkeley has been charged with providing both "classical" and "practical" education for the state's people.
Berkeley co-manages three United States Department of Energy National Laboratories, including the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory for the U.S. Department of Energy. Berkeley was a founding member of the Association of American Universities. Berkeley physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer was the scientific director of the Manhattan Project that developed the first atomic bomb in the world, which he personally headquartered at Los Alamos, New Mexico, during World War II.
Website - http://berkeley.edu/
3. Stanford University United States
The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an 8,180-acre (3,310 ha) campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately 20 miles (32 km) northwest of San Jose and 37 miles (60 km) southeast of San Francisco. Stanford is widely considered one of the most prestigious and selective universities in the world.
Leland Stanford, a Californian railroad tycoon and politician, founded the university in 1891 in honor of his son, Leland Stanford, Jr., who died of typhoid two months before his 16th birthday. The university was established as a coeducational and nondenominational institution, but struggled financially after the senior Stanford's 1893 death and after much of the campus was damaged by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Following World War II, Provost Frederick Terman supported faculty and graduates' entrepreneurialism to build self-sufficient local industry in what would become known as Silicon Valley. By 1970, Stanford was home to a linear accelerator, was one of the original four ARPANET nodes, and had transformed itself into a major research university in computer science, mathematics, natural sciences, and social sciences. More than 50 Stanford faculty, staff, and alumni have won the Nobel Prize (list of Nobel Laureates by university affiliation). Stanford also boasts the largest number of Turing award winners for a single institution. Stanford faculty and alumni have founded many prominent technology companies; according to Forbes Magazine "it is almost impossible to name a leading-edge company in Silicon Valley that isn't closely associated with Stanford;" examples include Cisco Systems, Google, Hewlett-Packard, LinkedIn, Netscape Communications, Rambus, Silicon Graphics, Sun Microsystems, Varian Associates, and Yahoo!.
Website - http://www.stanford.edu/
4. California Institute of Technology (Caltech) United States
The California Institute of Technology (commonly referred to as Caltech) is a private research university located in Pasadena, California, United States. Caltech has six academic divisions with strong emphases on science and engineering. Its 124 acre (50 ha) primary campus is located approximately 11 mi (18 km) northeast of downtown Los Angeles.
Although founded as a preparatory and vocational school by Amos G. Throop in 1891, the eponymous college attracted influential scientists such as George Ellery Hale, Arthur Amos Noyes, and Robert Andrews Millikan in the early 20th century. The vocational and preparatory schools were disbanded and spun off in 1910, and the college assumed its present name in 1921. In 1934, Caltech was elected to the Association of American Universities, and the antecedents of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which Caltech continues to manage and operate, were established between 1936 and 1943 under Theodore von Karman.
Caltech enrolls approximately 950 undergraduate and 1200 graduate students and employs about 300 professorial faculty. Despite its small size, 31 Caltech alumni and faculty have won the Nobel Prize and 65 have won the National Medal of Science or Technology.[3] There are 112 faculty members who have been elected to the National Academies. Caltech managed $332 million in sponsored research and $1.55 billion for its endowment in 2010.
Website - http://www.caltech.edu/
5. University of Cambridge United Kingdom
The University of Cambridge (informally Cambridge University, or simply Cambridge) is a public research university in Cambridge, England. It is the second-oldest university in both the United Kingdom and the English-speaking world, and the seventh-oldest globally. In post-nominals the university's name is abbreviated as Cantab, a shortened form of Cantabrigiensis (an adjective derived from Cantabrigia, the Latinised form of Cambridge).
The university grew out of an association of scholars in the city of Cambridge that was formed in 1209, early records suggest, by scholars leaving Oxford after a dispute with townsfolk. The two "ancient universities" have many common features and are often jointly referred to as Oxbridge. In addition to cultural and practical associations as a historic part of British society, they have a long history of rivalry with each other.
Academically Cambridge ranks as one of the top universities in the world: first in the world in both the 2010 and 2011 QS World University Rankings, sixth in the world in the 2010–2011 Times Higher Education World University Rankings, and fifth in the world (and first in Europe) in the 2010 Academic Ranking of World Universities. Cambridge regularly contends with Oxford for first place in UK league tables. In the most recently published ranking of UK universities, published by The Guardian newspaper, Cambridge was ranked first. It is widely regarded as being the best European University.
Website - http://www.cam.ac.uk/
6. Carnegie Mellon University United States
Carnegie Mellon University (also known as Carnegie Mellon or simply CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
The university began as the Carnegie Technical Schools, founded by Andrew Carnegie in 1900. In 1912, the school became Carnegie Institute of Technology and began granting four-year degrees. In 1967, the Carnegie Institute of Technology merged with the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research to form Carnegie Mellon University. The University’s 140-acre (0.57 km2) main campus is 3 miles (4.8 km) from Downtown Pittsburgh and abuts the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh, Schenley Park, and the campus of the University of Pittsburgh in the city's Oakland neighborhood, partially extending into Squirrel Hill and Shadyside.
Carnegie Mellon has seven colleges and independent schools: the Carnegie Institute of Technology (engineering), the College of Fine Arts, the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, the Mellon College of Science, the Tepper School of Business, the School of Computer Science, and the H. John Heinz III College.
Website - http://www.cmu.edu/
7. Imperial College London United Kingdom
Imperial College London (officially The Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine) is a public research university located in London, United Kingdom specialised in business, engineering, medicine and science. Formerly a constituent college of the federal University of London, Imperial became fully independent in 2007, the 100th anniversary of its founding.
Imperial's main campus is located in the South Kensington area of Central London on the boundary between the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea and the City of Westminster, with its main entrance on Exhibition Road. It has a number of other campuses in Central London, including in Chelsea, Hammersmith and Paddington. With a total of 525,233 square metres of operational property, it has the largest estate of any higher education institution in the UK. Imperial is organised into four main academic units — three faculties and the Imperial College Business School — within which there are over 40 departments, institutes and research centres.
Imperial has around 13,500 full-time students and 3,330 academic and research staff and had a total income of £694 million in 2009/10, of which £297 million was from research grants and contracts. Imperial is a major centre for biomedical research and is a founding member of the Imperial College Healthcare academic health science centre. Imperial is ranked 26th in the world (and 5th in Europe) in the 2010 Academic Ranking of World Universities, 7th in the world (and 4th in Europe) in the 2010 QS World University Rankings, and 9th in the world (and 3rd in Europe) in the 2010 Times Higher Education World University Rankings. There are currently 14 Nobel Prize winners and two Fields Medal winners amongst Imperial's alumni and current and former faculty.
Website - http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/
8. Georgia Institute of Technology United States
The Georgia Institute of Technology (commonly called Georgia Tech, Tech, and GT) is a public research university in Atlanta, Georgia, in the United States. It is a part of the University System of Georgia and has satellite campuses in Savannah, Georgia; Metz, France; Athlone, Ireland; Shanghai, China; and Singapore.
The educational institution was founded in 1885 as the Georgia School of Technology as part of Reconstruction plans to build an industrial economy in the post-Civil War Southern United States. Initially, it offered only a degree in mechanical engineering. By 1901, its curriculum had expanded to include electrical, civil, and chemical engineering. In 1948, the school changed its name to reflect its evolution from a trade school to a larger and more capable technical institute and research university. Today, Georgia Tech is organized into six colleges and contains about 31 departments/units, with a strong emphasis on science and technology. It is well recognized for its degree programs in engineering, computing, management, the sciences, architecture, and liberal arts. Tech is consistently ranked as one of the top 10 public universities in the nation and is a member of the highly prestigious Association of American Universities.
Georgia Tech's main campus occupies a large part of Midtown Atlanta, bordered by 10th Street to the north and by North Avenue to the south, placing it well in sight of the Atlanta skyline. In 1996, the campus was the site of the athletes' village and a venue for a number of athletic events for the 1996 Summer Olympics. The construction of the Olympic village, along with subsequent gentrification of the surrounding areas greatly enhanced the campus.
Website - http://www.gatech.edu/
9. University of Tokyo Japan
The University of Tokyo, abbreviated as Todai, is a major research university located in Tokyo, Japan. The University has 10 faculties with a total of around 30,000 students, 2,100 of whom are foreign. Its five campuses are in HongÅ, Komaba, Kashiwa, Shirokane and Nakano. It is considered to be the most prestigious university in Japan. It ranks as the highest in Asia and 20th in the world in 2010 according to Academic Ranking of World Universities.
The university was chartered by the Meiji government in 1877 under its current name by amalgamating older government schools for medicine and Western learning. It was renamed "the Imperial University in 1886, and then Tokyo Imperial University in 1897 when the Imperial University system was created. In 1947, after Japan's defeat in World War II, it re-assumed its original name. With the start of the new university system in 1949, Todai swallowed up the former First Higher School (today's Komaba campus) and the former Tokyo Higher School, which henceforth assumed the duty of teaching first and second-year undergraduates, while the faculties on Hongo main campus took care of third and fourth-year students.
Although the university was founded during the Meiji period, it has earlier roots in the Astronomy Agency, Shoheizaka Study Office, and the Western Books Translation Agency. These institutions were government offices established by the Tokugawa shogunate (1603–1867), and played an important role in the importation and translation of books from Europe.
Website - http://www.u-tokyo.ac.jp/
10. University of Toronto Canada
The University of Toronto (U of T, UToronto, or simply Toronto) is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, situated on the grounds that surround Queen's Park. It was founded by royal charter in 1827 as King's College, the first institution of higher learning in Upper Canada. Originally controlled by the Church of England, the university assumed the present name in 1850 upon becoming a secular institution. As a collegiate university, it comprises twelve colleges that differ in character and history, each retaining substantial autonomy on financial and institutional affairs.
Academically, the University of Toronto is noted for influential movements and curricula in literary criticism and communication theory, known collectively as the Toronto School. The university was the birthplace of insulin and stem cell research, and was the site of the first practical electron microscope, the development of multi-touch technology, the identification of Cygnus X-1 as a black hole, and the theory of NP completeness. By a significant margin, it receives the most annual research funding of any Canadian university.
The Varsity Blues are the athletic teams that represent the university in intercollegiate league matches, with particularly long and storied ties to gridiron football and ice hockey. The university's Hart House is an early example of the North American student centre, simultaneously serving cultural, intellectual and recreational interests within its large Gothic-revival complex.
Website - http://www.utoronto.ca/