The University of Sheffield is a research university, located in Sheffield in South Yorkshire, England.
History
The University of Sheffield was originally formed by the merger of three colleges. The Sheffield School of Medicine was founded in 1828, followed in 1879 by the opening of Firth College by Mark Firth, a steel manufacturer, to teach arts and science subjects. Firth College then helped to fund the opening of the Sheffield Technical School in 1884 to teach applied science, the only major faculty the existing colleges did not cover. The three institutions merged in 1897 to form the University College of Sheffield. Sheffield is one of the six original Red Brick Universities.
Victoria University
It was originally envisaged that the University College would join Manchester, Liverpool and Leeds as the fourth member of the federal Victoria University.
Victoria University
It was originally envisaged that the University College would join Manchester, Liverpool and Leeds as the fourth member of the federal Victoria University.
However, the Victoria University began to split-up before this could happen and so the University College of Sheffield received its own Royal Charter in 1905 and became the University of Sheffield.
From 200 full-time students in 1905, the University grew slowly until the 1950s and 1960s when it began to expand rapidly. Many new buildings (including the famous Arts Tower) were built and student numbers increased to their present levels of over 20,000.
In 1995, the University took over the Sheffield and North Trent College of Nursing and Midwifery, which greatly increased the size of the medical faculty. In 2005, the South Yorkshire Strategic Health Authority announced that it would split the training between Sheffield and Sheffield Hallam University - however, the University decided to pull out of providing preregistration nursing and midwifery training due to "costs and operational difficulties".
Over the years, the University has been home to a number of notable writers and scholars, including the literary critic William Empson, who was head of the Department of English; author Angela Carter; five Nobel Prize winners; and Bernard Crick.
Nobel Prizes
The University's Faculty of Pure Science may boast an association with five Nobel Prizes, two for the Department of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology:
- 1945 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (joint award) Prof. Howard Florey, for his work on penicillin.
- 1953 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, Prof. Hans Adolf Krebs, "for the discovery of the citric acid cycle in cellular respiration"
- And three to its Department of Chemistry:
- 1967 Nobel Prize in Chemistry (joint award), Prof. George Porter (later Lord Porter), "for their work on extremely fast chemical reactions" (see Flash photolysis)
- 1993 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (joint award), Richard J. Roberts, "for the discovery that genes in eukaryotes are not contiguous strings but contain introns, and that the splicing of messenger RNA to delete those introns can occur in different ways, yielding different proteins from the same DNA sequence"
- 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry (joint award), Sir Harry Kroto, "for their discovery of fullerenes").
Teaching quality assessments rate our teaching very highly across a wide range of subjects, and official research assessments confirm our reputation as a centre for world-class research in many disciplines.
We have more than 24,000 students from 118 countries, and almost 6000 staff. The University of Sheffield is a popular choice with applicants for university places, and once they arrive our students enjoy the experience so much that many settle in Sheffield after they graduate.
Our research partners and clients include Boeing, Rolls Royce, Unilever, Boots, AstraZeneca, GSK, ICI, Slazenger, and many more household names, as well as UK and overseas government agencies and charitable foundations.
Our academic partners include leading universities around the world. International partnerships include Worldwide Universities Network (USA, Europe and China) and our partnership with Leeds and York Universities (the White Rose Consortium) has combined research power greater than that of either Oxford or Cambridge.
The University's history stretches back to 1828, when the Sheffield School of Medicine was founded, and our University Charter was granted in 1905.
The University holds charitable status as an Exempt Charity. The benefits include tax savings to both the University and to charitable donors or their estates.
Reputation
Sheffield was the Sunday Times University of the Year in 2001 and has consistently appeared as one of their top-30 institutions. Just three universities nationally have more than Sheffield's 30 top-rated subjects for teaching excellence and only five have a greater number than the 35 subject areas at Sheffield deemed to have conducted world-class research in the most recent ratings.
The University of Sheffield is rated 8th in the UK, 18th in Europe and 69th in the world in an annual academic ranking of the top 500 universities worldwide published in August 2005. Shanghai Jiao Tong University evaluated the universities using several research performance indicators, including the number of highly cited researchers, academic performance, articles in the periodicals Science and Nature, and the number of Nobel prize-winners. A separate ranking, published in the US by Newsweek magazine, and released in August 2006, ranked Sheffield 9th in the UK, 18th in Europe and 70th in the world in a list of the Global Top 100 Universities. The University is rated 12th in the UK, 22nd in Europe and 68th in the world in the Times Higher Education Supplement's November 2007 ranking of the top 200 universities in the world.
Faculties
The University is in the process of changing its structure, from the existing seven facultie into five new faculties:
Faculty of Arts and Humanities
Faculty of Engineering
Faculty of Medicine and Health
Faculty of Pure Science
Faculty of Social Sciences
University of Sheffield Ranked 69th in the 2007 THES-QS World University ranking
University of Sheffield Ranked 76th in the 2008 THES-QS World University ranking
University of Sheffield Ranked 82nd in the 2009 THES-QS World University ranking
University of Sheffield Ranked 69th in the 2010 QS World University ranking
University of Sheffield Ranked 72nd in the 2011 QS World University ranking