Brown University

Brown University is a private Ivy League research university on College Hill in Providence, Rhode Island. It was founded in 1764 as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, making it the seventh-oldest college in the United States. The college moved from Warren to Providence in 1770 and took the name of benefactor Nicholas Brown in 1804. Since 1969 undergraduates have studied under the Open Curriculum, which has no general education requirements.

Brown's academic units are the College, the Graduate School, the Warren Alpert Medical School, the School of Engineering, the School of Public Health, the School of Professional Studies, and the Watson School of International and Public Affairs. It is known for applied mathematics, computer science, neuroscience, public health, literary arts, and history. It also has one of the few departments of Egyptology and Assyriology in the United States. Research centers include the Carney Institute for Brain Science, the Data Science Institute, and the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society.

Brown enrolls about 11,000 students, and roughly a third are in graduate and medical programs. International students make up a larger share of doctoral enrollment than of the undergraduate college. Physicist Leon Cooper won the Nobel Prize while on the faculty, and Nobel laureate Craig Mello is an alumnus. Other alumni include Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, media founder Ted Turner and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller Jr.

The Graduate School offers PhD programs in about 50 fields, along with master's degrees in areas such as data science, public health, engineering and public affairs. Doctoral students receive a multi-year package of stipend, tuition remission and health coverage, and they are supervised within their departments after coursework and qualifying exams. Brown runs on semesters. Providence is a small, walkable capital city about an hour by train from Boston.

In the Grad School Navigator directory, Brown University lists 101 graduate programs across 36 subjects: 40 master's programs and 55 doctoral programs, with the widest choice in area studies, public health and biology. Brown University holds rank 30 in the GSN Overall University Ranking.