University of Edinburgh

The University of Edinburgh is a public research university in Scotland's capital. It was established by royal charter in 1582 as the Tounis College, making it the fourth-oldest university in Scotland. It played a central part in the Scottish Enlightenment. Later mergers added Moray House, a teacher-education institution, in 1998 and Edinburgh College of Art in 2011. The university is spread across several sites: the Central Area around George Square and Old College, King's Buildings for science and engineering, BioQuarter at Little France for medicine, and Easter Bush for veterinary and animal science.

Its academic work is grouped into three colleges: Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences; Medicine and Veterinary Medicine; and Science and Engineering. Together they contain about 20 schools. The university is known for informatics and artificial intelligence, medicine, veterinary science, linguistics, philosophy and physics. Key centers include the Roslin Institute, where Dolly the sheep was cloned, and the Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies. Others are the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre, the Bayes Centre for data science and the Edinburgh Futures Institute.

Edinburgh has about 50,000 students, and more than a third are postgraduates. More than 40 percent of students come from outside the UK, from over 150 countries. About 20 Nobel laureates are linked to the university, including the physicist Peter Higgs, who spent most of his career there. Its alumni include David Hume, Arthur Conan Doyle and Charles Darwin, who studied medicine there.

Graduate study includes taught MSc and MSc by Research degrees, which usually last one year, and three- to four-year PhDs. Many PhDs are funded through UKRI doctoral training partnerships and centers for doctoral training. The year is split into two semesters. Funding comes from research councils, school studentships and a range of international scholarships. Graduate students live in a compact, walkable city that hosts the Edinburgh festivals every August.

In the Grad School Navigator directory, University of Edinburgh lists 511 graduate programs across 56 subjects: 349 master's programs and 156 doctoral programs, with the widest choice in biology, health & medical sciences and languages & linguistics. University of Edinburgh holds rank 50 in the GSN Overall University Ranking.