The University of Alabama at Birmingham

The University of Alabama at Birmingham is a public research university in downtown Birmingham, Alabama. It became an independent campus of the University of Alabama System in 1969, building on a Birmingham extension center opened in the 1930s and on the Medical College of Alabama, which moved to the city in 1945. UAB grew as an urban academic medical center rather than a residential land-grant campus, with classrooms, hospitals, and laboratories occupying a contiguous district of city blocks.

The university is organized into more than a dozen schools, among them the Heersink School of Medicine, the School of Nursing, the School of Public Health, the School of Engineering, and the Collat School of Business. Graduate work is concentrated in the health sciences, biomedical research, and related engineering. UAB Hospital and the O'Neal Comprehensive Cancer Center are the main clinical and laboratory sites for doctoral and professional students.

UAB enrolls about 22,000 students, including several thousand in graduate and professional programs in medicine, dentistry, optometry, nursing, and public health. International students form a modest share of enrollment. The faculty includes physician-scientists and federally funded investigators. Alumni include journalist Howell Raines and Olympic bobsledder Vonetta Flowers, with many others in medicine and public health.

Graduate study includes the MD, the PhD and dual MD-PhD, nursing and public-health doctorates, and master's degrees in engineering and business. Biomedical supervision is laboratory-based; professional programs combine coursework with clinical rotations. The calendar is the standard US semester. Support often comes through research assistantships, training grants, and hospital appointments. Students live and work in central Birmingham, with labs and clinics on the same urban campus.

In the Grad School Navigator directory, The University of Alabama at Birmingham lists 19 graduate programs across 4 subjects: 6 master's programs and 13 doctoral programs, with the widest choice in biology, education and neuroscience.