Description
The University of Sheffield is a public research university in Sheffield, South Yorkshire, England. Its history traces back to the foundation of Sheffield Medical School in 1828, Firth College in 1879 and Sheffield Technical School in 1884. The University College of Sheffield was subsequently formed by the amalgamation of the three institutions in 1897 and was granted a royal charter as the University of Sheffield in 1905 by King Edward VII.
Sheffield is formed from 50 academic departments which are organised into five faculties and an international faculty. The annual income of the institution for 2023–24 was £887.9 million, of which £185.8 million was from research grants and contracts, with an expenditure of £651.4 million. Sheffield is regarded as one of the top engineering universities in Europe. As of the latest HESA statistics, it had the highest engineering research income and expenditure among all the universities in the UK for two consecutive years.
The university is one of the original red brick universities and a founding member of the Russell Group. It is also part of the Worldwide Universities Network, the N8 Group of the eight most research intensive universities in Northern England and the White Rose University Consortium. Sheffield has been ranked in between 66th and 105th best university in the world by QS for the last fifteen years. The THE ranked the university 22nd in Europe for teaching excellence in 2020. According to the latest Research Excellence Framework 2021, Sheffield is ranked 11th in the UK for research power calculated by multiplying the institution's GPA by the total number of full-time equivalent staff submitted.
There are six Nobel laureates affiliated with Sheffield, as either the alumni or former long-term staff of the university. They are contributors to the development of penicillin, the discovery of the citric acid cycle, the investigation of high-speed chemical reactions, the discovery of introns in eukaryotic DNA, the discovery of fullerene, and the development of molecular machines. Alumni also include several heads of state, Home Secretaries, Court of Appeal judges, Booker Prize winners, astronauts and Olympic gold medallists.
