University of Birmingham

The University of Birmingham is a public civic university in Edgbaston, on the south side of Birmingham, England. It received its royal charter in 1900, the first of the English civic universities to do so, and grew out of Mason Science College, founded in 1880. It remains a campus university on a single large Edgbaston site rather than a collegiate federation, with a medical school whose roots are older still.

Five colleges cover arts and law; engineering and physical sciences; life and environmental sciences; medical and dental sciences; and social sciences. Graduate students in medicine and biomedical science work with University Hospitals Birmingham and the Queen Elizabeth Hospital. The university also houses a business school, a law school, and research institutes in cancer, energy, and materials. Engineering, physics, history, and international development are other fields with a large postgraduate presence.

About 38,000 students enroll, and more than a third are international, drawn from around 150 countries. Several thousand academic staff teach and supervise. Nobel laureates associated with the university include chemist Norman Haworth and physiologist Peter Medawar. Notable alumni include Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, novelist David Lodge, and diplomat Valerie Amos.

Graduate degrees include taught master's, MRes, MPhil, and PhD awards, with clinical and professional doctorates in health fields. Supervision is the core of research degrees, often inside doctoral training partnerships. The calendar follows the UK three-term year. Studentships from UK research councils and university scholarships are the usual doctoral funding. Graduate life is based on the Edgbaston campus, a short ride from the center of Britain's second-largest city.

In the Grad School Navigator directory, University of Birmingham lists 224 graduate programs across 47 subjects: 171 master's programs and 52 doctoral programs, with the widest choice in health & medical sciences, biology and languages & linguistics. University of Birmingham holds rank 132 in the GSN Overall University Ranking.