Berkeley ranks first among U.S. universities in the number of highly ranked graduate programs. In a report published in September 2010, the National Research Council (NRC) placed 48 out of 52 ranked UC Berkeley doctoral programs within the top 10 nationally.  This compared to 46 of 52 programs for Harvard University, which came in second, and 40 of 59 programs for UCLA, in third place. View more details and the NRC rankings by department.

Among UC Berkeley's current faculty are:

• 9 Nobel laureates
• 135 members of the National Academy of Sciences
• 87 members of the National Academy of Engineering
• 12 recipients of the National Medal of Science
• 225 Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• 3 recipients of the Fields Medal in Mathematics
• 362 Guggenheim Fellows
• 30 MacArthur Fellows
• 3 recipients of the A.M Turing Award (Computing)
• 14 Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigators
• 61 National Science Foundation Young Investigators Awards
• 4 winners of the Pulitzer Prize
• 1 National Poet Laureate

For a historical overview of discoveries and contributions by UC Berkeley scholars since 1887, please click here.

Graduate Students:

Research Funding:

Research funding by sponsor, July 2010-June 2011, calculated on the basis of budget period.

Each year, the Berkeley campus receives well over one-half billion dollars in research support from external sources. In the fiscal year ending June 30, 2011, Berkeley attracted  $717 million in new research funding. This represents a 30 percent increase over the past five years. Many of these awards fund multi-year projects and support expenditures that will be reflected in subsequent years.

The federal government provided 63 percent of these sponsored research funds, and agencies of the State of California, industry, and the non-profit sector supplied the rest. Of the research funding provided by the U.S. government, the largest contributors are the Department of Health and Human Services and the National Science Foundation, with each contributing approximately one third of the federal funding.

Inventions and Patents:

An important part of UC Berkeley's research mission is to ensure that the public benefits from our research through developing practical applications of our research results. To that end, the University's Office of Technology Licensing works with campus inventors to facilitate the transfer of UC Berkeley-created technologies and software into the commercial sector for public use. As of June 2009, Berkeley owns

• 2,217 total inventions
• 569 U.S. patents
• 465 foreign patents; and has
• 300 active license agreements with commercial firms for the use of its patented technologies.

UC Berkeley and the Berkeley Lab:

UC Berkeley has a unique and historic relationship with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). Berkeley Lab’s founder and namesake Ernest Lawrence was a UC Berkeley physics professor who started his Radiation Laboratory in a modest building on the Berkeley campus in 1931. Nine years later he moved the laboratory to its current location in the hills directly above campus, where in the 1950s it became part of the U.S. Department of Energy’s national laboratory system. The partnership between the two institutions has endured and thrived. Today, more than 200 UC Berkeley faculty members also hold appointments at the Berkeley Lab (plus 28 faculty from other UC campuses). In addition, Berkeley Lab hosts nearly 600 UC Berkeley graduate and undergraduate students, along with 475 post-doctoral researchers. The two institutions are partners in a number of major research efforts including the Joint BioEnergy Institute, the Energy Biosciences Institute and the Helios solar energy initiative.