University of Sheffield: Difference between revisions
No edit summary |
Zhenling.sun (talk | contribs) No edit summary |
||
| Line 83: | Line 83: | ||
* 1993 Nobel Prize in Phisiology or Medicine (joint award), [[Richard J. Roberts]], "for the discovery that genes in eukaryotes are not contiguous strings but contain introns, and that the splicing of messenger RNA to delete those introns can occur in different ways, yielding different proteins from the same DNA sequence" |
* 1993 Nobel Prize in Phisiology or Medicine (joint award), [[Richard J. Roberts]], "for the discovery that genes in eukaryotes are not contiguous strings but contain introns, and that the splicing of messenger RNA to delete those introns can occur in different ways, yielding different proteins from the same DNA sequence" |
||
* 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry (joint award), [[Harry Kroto|Sir Harry Kroto]], "for their discovery of fullerenes"). |
* 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry (joint award), [[Harry Kroto|Sir Harry Kroto]], "for their discovery of fullerenes"). |
||
With another nobel laureate, Howard Florey, Sheffield shares some glory. Howard Florey was the Joseph Hunter Professor of Pathology at Sheffield from 1932 until his move to Oxford in 1935. In 1945 Florey and his colleague Ernst Chain, together with Alexander Fleming were awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine for their work on penicillin. |
|||
==Students and faculty== |
==Students and faculty== |
||
Revision as of 15:09, 19 March 2006
| Logo of the University of Sheffield | |
| Motto | Rerum cognoscere causas (to discover the causes of things) |
|---|---|
| Type | Public |
| Established | 1897 (became university 1905) |
| Chancellor | Sir Peter Middleton |
| Vice-Chancellor | Prof. Bob Boucher, CBE |
| Students | 26,096 |
| Undergraduates | 18,734 |
| Postgraduates | 7,362 |
| Location | , , |
| Campus | Urban |
| Colours | Azure |
| Affiliations | Russell Group, WUN, EUA, ACU, N8, White Rose, Yorkshire Universities |
| Website | www.shef.ac.uk |
The University of Sheffield is a leading university, located in Sheffield, UK.
History
The University of Sheffield was originally formed by the merger of three colleges. The Sheffield School of Medicine was founded in 1828. This was followed in 1879 by the opening of Firth College by Mark Firth, a steel manufacturer, to teach arts and science subjects. Firth College then helped to fund the opening of the Sheffield Technical School in 1884 to teach applied science, the only major faculty the existing colleges did not cover. The three institutions merged in 1897 to form the University College of Sheffield.
It was originally envisaged that the University College would join Manchester, Liverpool and Leeds as the fourth member of the federal Victoria University. However, the Victoria University began to split-up before this could happen and so the University College of Sheffield received its own Royal Charter in 1905 and became the University of Sheffield.
From 114 full-time students in 1905, the University grew slowly until the 1950s and 1960s when it began to expand rapidly. Many new buildings (including the famous Arts Tower) were built and student numbers increased to their present levels of over 20,000.
Development has continued since. In 1995, the University took over the Sheffield and North Trent College of Nursing and Midwifery, which greatly increased the size of the medical faculty. In 2005 it decided to pass these subjects over to Hallam University.
Over the years, the University has been home to a number of famous writers and scholars, including the literary critic William Empson, who was head of the Department of English; author Angela Carter; the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Sir Harry Kroto and Bernard Crick, who taught politics with future Labour Party politician David Blunkett as one of his students.
Location
The University of Sheffield is not a campus university, though most of its buildings are close together. The centre of the University's presence lies one mile to the west of Sheffield city centre where there is a mile-long collection of buildings belonging almost entirely to the University. This area includes the students' union, the Octagon Centre, Firth Court, the Geography building, the Alfred Denny Building (housing natural sciences and including a small museum), the Dainton Building (chemistry) and the Hicks Building (mathematics and physics). The Grade II*-listed library and Arts Tower are also located there. A concourse under the main road allows students to easily move between these buildings.
East lies St George's Campus, named for St George's Church, now a lecture theatre. The campus is centred on Mappin Street, home to a number of University buildings, including the faculty of engineering (partly housed in the Grade II-listed Mappin Building) and the departments of management and computer science. The University also maintains the Turner Museum of Glass in this area. The University has recently acquired the nearby former Jessop Hospital and HSE Building and plans to convert these to house more departments.
To the west lies parkland, the Sheffield City Museum, the Mappin Art Gallery, sports facilities and the faculties of law in the Crookesmoor area and medicine (housed in the city's extensive teaching hospitals).
Further west still lie the University halls of residence, Ranmoor House, Sorby, Earnshaw, Halifax, Stephenson and Tapton, and the music department, in the Broomhill and Crookes areas of the city.
The Manvers campus, between Rotherham and Barnsley, is where the majority of nursing is taught.
Organisation
Like most British universities, the University of Sheffield is headed by a Vice-Chancellor (Prof Bob Boucher, CBE) and a titular Chancellor (Sir Peter Middleton). The University is organised into seven faculties, with all the faculties except Law being sub-divided into numerous departments:
- Faculty of Architectural Studies
- Faculty of Arts
- Faculty of Engineering
- Faculty of Law
- Faculty of Medicine
- Faculty of Pure Science
- Faculty of Social Sciences
Research and Reputation
The University of Sheffield is a major contributor to research, being the sixth most highly rated research university in the UK (2001).
The University is a member of the Russell Group, the European University Association, the Worldwide Universities Network and the White Rose University Consortium.
The University of Sheffield is rated 8th in the UK, 18th in Europe and 65th in the world in an annual academic ranking of the top 500 universities worldwide published in August 2005. Researchers at China's Shanghai Jiao Tong University evaluated the universities using several research performance indicators, including the number of highly cited researchers, academic performance, articles in the periodicals Science and Nature, and the number of Nobel prizewinners.
The University has won Queen's Anniversary Awards in 1998, 2000 and 2002. It was also named the Sunday Times University of the Year in 2001. In 2005, the Sunday Times rated the University as the 24th best in the UK.
Sheffield is particularly famous for its Archaeology, Architecture, Chemistry, Engineering, English, Music, Philosophy and Politics departments, which are heavily oversubscribed.
In 2005 the University invested a six figure sum on redesigning its logo. When the new logo was revealed little had changed, save for a full stop at the end of the University's name. The amount spent raised a few eyebrows around the university, not just from students but from staff as well and an article in the student newspaper, The Steel Press, raised the issue of the need to spend this amount of money. Recently this question has been raised again in the paper after the University spent £200,000 on a face lift for the main university building, Firth Court.
Major research partners and clients include Boeing, Rolls Royce, Unilever, Boots, AstraZeneca, GSK, ICI, Slazenger, and many more household names, as well as UK and overseas government agencies and charitable foundations.
Nobel Prizes
The University's Faculty of Pure Science may boast an association with four Nobel Prizes, one for the Department of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology:
- (1953 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, Prof. Hans Adolf Krebs, "for the discovery of the citric acid cycle in cellular respiration")
As well as three to its world-renowned Department of Chemistry:
- (1967 Nobel Prize in Chemistry (joint award), Prof. George Porter (later Lord Porter), "for their work on extremely fast chemical reactions" (see Flash Photolysis)
- 1993 Nobel Prize in Phisiology or Medicine (joint award), Richard J. Roberts, "for the discovery that genes in eukaryotes are not contiguous strings but contain introns, and that the splicing of messenger RNA to delete those introns can occur in different ways, yielding different proteins from the same DNA sequence"
- 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry (joint award), Sir Harry Kroto, "for their discovery of fullerenes").
With another nobel laureate, Howard Florey, Sheffield shares some glory. Howard Florey was the Joseph Hunter Professor of Pathology at Sheffield from 1932 until his move to Oxford in 1935. In 1945 Florey and his colleague Ernst Chain, together with Alexander Fleming were awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine for their work on penicillin.
Students and faculty
The University of Sheffield's 25,000 students arrive mostly from the UK, but 2,500 are international students, with many from Malaysia.
The university employs 5,500 people, including almost 1,400 academic staff.
Students' union, sports and traditions
The University of Sheffield Union of Students is the largest students' union in the UK, with two bars (Bar One (which has a bookable room with its own bar situated next to it called the Raynor Lounge) and The Interval), three club venues (Fusion, Foundry and Octagon), two off-campus public houses (The Fox and Duck and The Rising Sun), a cinema, nearly one hundred student societies, many sports teams and a turnover of around £8,000,000.
In addition to the student union-supported sports teams, Sheffield University Bankers Hockey Club play top-flight field hockey in the national first division. The annual Varsity Challenge takes place between teams from the University and its rival Sheffield Hallam University in over 30 events.
As part of RAG week, University of Sheffield students used to take part in the Pyjama Jump[1] pub crawl, dressed only in nightwear in mid-winter: the men often to dress in nighties and the women in pyjamas. This event was banned in 1997 following the hospitalisation of several students.[2] Another RAG week tradition is the Spiderwalk, a fifty mile trek through the city and the Peak District, the first half through the night.
Notable alumni
- Sir Donald Bailey, civil engineer and inventor of the Bailey bridge
- Carol Barnes, newsreader
- David Blunkett, politician (BA(Hons) Political Theory and Institutions, 1972)
- Stephen Daldry, film director
- David Davies, Football Association chief executive
- John Devaney, Chairman,Marconi PLC
- Martin Fry, lead singer of ABC
- Nicci Gerrard, author
- Joanne Harris, author (later became faculty)
- Penny Hughes, former president of Coca-Cola Enterprises (UK) (BSc(Hons) Chemistry)
- Eddie Izzard, comedian
- Amy Johnson, pilot (BA(Hons) Economics, 1926)
- The Rt. Hon Lord Justice Maurice Kay, Lord Justice of Appeal
- Sir Hans Kornberg, biochemist
- Harold Kroto, Nobel Prize-winning chemist (BSc(Hons) Chemistry, 1961; PhD, 1961-1964)
- Vanessa Lawrence, Ordnance Survey director general
- Sir Peter Middleton, Camelot chairman
- Tony Miles, Britain's first chess grand master
- John O'Leary, Times Higher Education Supplement editor
- Dame Anne Rafferty, High Court judge
- Richard Roberts, Nobel Prize-winning geneticist (BSc(Hons) Chemistry, 1965; PhD, 1968)
- Jack Rosenthal, playwright
- Helen Sharman, astronaut (BSc(Hons) Chemistry, 1984)
- Rachel Shelley, actress (BA(Hons) English and Drama)
- Linda Smith, comedian
- Ann Taylor, politician
- David Wetherall, footballer
Notable faculty
- Angela Carter, author (1976-1978)
- Charles Eliot, Vice Chancellor
- William Empson, poet
- Joanne Harris, author (2000; was also a student)
- Sir Ian Kershaw, historian
- Hans Adolf Krebs, Nobel Prize-winning biochemist (1935-1954)
- Stephen Laurence, philosopher and cognitive scientist
- Edward Mellanby, pharmacologist and discoverer of Vitamin D
- George Porter, Nobel Prize-winning chemist (1955-1966)
- Dominic Sandbrook, historian (2001-2004)
- William Sarjeant, geologist