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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 Sheffield 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:

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.

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:

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 function room with its own bar, The Raynor Lounge) and The Interval), three club venues (Fusion, Foundry and Octagon, one off-campus public house (The Fox and Duck), a cinema, over one hundred student societies, many sports teams and a turnover of around £8,000,000.

The University of Sheffield Union of Students also has a student radio station called Sure Radio. The station broadcasts throughout the union and on the internet during term time.

The University has its own newspaper, Sheffield Steel, which is normally printed every fortnight, and an online newspaper, sheffieldbase.com.

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 Jumppub 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.[http://www.shef.ac.uk/pr/press_releases/pr99/3-99.html 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

Notable faculty

See also

External links

Education in Sheffield | Educational institutions established in 1897 | Educational institutions established in 1905 | Nursing schools in the United Kingdom | Universities in England | Universities in Yorkshire

Universitato de Sheffield | Sheffieldin yliopisto | University of Sheffield | 谢菲尔德大学

 

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the "University of Sheffield".

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