University of Manchester

The University of Manchester
Arms of the University of Manchester
Motto	Latin: Cognitio, sapientia, humanitas
Motto in English	"Knowledge, Wisdom, Humanity"
Established	2004, by the merger of the Victoria University of Manchester (established 1851) and UMIST (established 1824)
Endowment	£127m (2009)[1]
Chancellor	Tom Bloxham
Vice-Chancellor	Professor Dame Nancy Rothwell DBE
Admin. staff	10,407
Students	39,165[2]
Undergraduates	27,310[2]
Postgraduates	11,850[2]
Location	Manchester, England
Campus	Urban and Suburban
Colours	Blue, Gold, Purple
Affiliations	Russell Group, EUA, N8 Group, NWUA, ACU
Website	manchester.ac.uk

The University of Manchester is a "red brick" civic university located in Manchester, England. It is a member of the Russell Group of large research-intensive universities and the N8 Group for research collaboration. The university was formed in 2004 by the dissolution of the Victoria University of Manchester (which was commonly known as the University of Manchester) and UMIST (University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology) and the immediate formation of a single institution inaugurated on 1 October. The University of Manchester and the constituent former institutions combined have 23 Nobel Laureates among their former students and staff, the third largest number of any single university in the United Kingdom behind Oxford and Cambridge.

Following the merger, the university was named Sunday Times University of the Year in 2006 after winning the inaugural Times Higher Education Supplement University of the Year prize in 2005.^[3] According to The Sunday Times, "Manchester has a formidable reputation spanning most disciplines, but most notably in the life sciences, engineering, humanities, economics, sociology and the social sciences".^[4]

In 2007/08, the University of Manchester had over 40,000 students studying 500 academic programmes and more than 10,000 staff, making it the largest single-site university in the United Kingdom.^[5] More students try to gain entry to the University of Manchester than any other university in the country, with more than 60,000 applications for undergraduate courses alone.^[4] In 2007 the University had an annual income of £637 million.^[6]

In the first national assessment of higher education research since the university’s founding, the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise,^[7] the University of Manchester came 3rd in terms of research power after Cambridge and Oxford and 8th for grade point average quality when including specialist institutions.^[8] The university was also ranked 8th in Europe and 26th worldwide by the Times Higher World University Rankings 2009.

History

The university's Whitworth Hall. This archway was the inspiration for the logo of the Victoria University of Manchester

The University's history as an academic institution began in 1824 and is closely linked to Manchester's emergence as the world's first industrial city. The English chemist John Dalton, together with Manchester businessmen and industrialists, established the Mechanics' Institute (later to become UMIST) to ensure that workers could learn the basic principles of science. Similarly, John Owens, a Manchester textile merchant, left a bequest of £96,942 in 1846 for the purpose of founding a college for the education of males on non-sectarian lines. His trustees established Owens College at Manchester in 1851. It was initially housed in a building, complete with Adam staircase, on the corner of Quay Street and Byrom Street which had been the home of the philanthropist Richard Cobden, and subsequently was to house Manchester County Court. In 1873 it moved to new buildings at Oxford Road, Chorlton-on-Medlock and from 1880 it was a constituent college of the federal Victoria University. The university was established and granted a Royal Charter in 1880 to become England's first civic university; it was renamed the Victoria University of Manchester in 1903 and then absorbed Owens College the following year.^[9]

By 1905 the two institutions were large and active forces in the area, with the Municipal College of Technology, the forerunner of the later UMIST, forming the Faculty of Technology of the Victoria University of Manchester while continuing as a technical college in parallel with the advanced courses of study in the Faculty.

In 1987 Emeritus Professor John Griffith, then Chancellor of Manchester University, warned in a prescient article entitled "The Attack on Higher Education" of the serious danger posed by government policy which seeks to control the management of higher education. He pointed out the political weakness of the universities in the face of such governmental attack, a weakness which he saw as stemming from the universities' hierarchical structure, and the consequent antagonisms of political viewpoint between university heads and their staff. He concluded: "The history of this century in many countries warns us that democracy depends on a large degree of autonomy for the institutions of higher education. No governments of any political complexion must be allowed to destroy their freedom". 'Since that article was written the independence of both universities and individual academics has been savagely eroded, and one of the principal mechanisms for that erosion has been the corruption of the principle of collegial governance.' George Wilmers, elected member of Senate and Post Graduate Tutor in the Dept of Mathematics, writing in 1994.

Before the merger, the University and UMIST between them counted 23 Nobel Prize winners amongst their former staff and students. Manchester has traditionally been particularly strong in the sciences, with the nuclear nature of the atom being discovered at Manchester by Rutherford, and the world's first stored-program computer coming into being at the university. Famous scientists associated with the university include the physicists Osborne Reynolds, Niels Bohr, Ernest Rutherford, James Chadwick, Arthur Schuster, Hans Geiger, Ernest Marsden and Balfour Stewart. However, the university has also contributed in many other fields, such as by the work of the mathematicians Paul Erdős, Horace Lamb and Alan Turing; the author Anthony Burgess; philosophers Samuel Alexander, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Alasdair MacIntyre; the Pritzker Prize and RIBA Stirling Prize winning architect Norman Foster and the composer Peter Maxwell Davies all attended, or worked in, Manchester. Well-known figures among the current academic staff include author Martin Amis, computer scientist Steve Furber, literary critic Terry Eagleton, economist Richard Nelson^[10] and biochemist Sir John Sulston, Nobel laureate of 2002.

In 2004, the Victoria University of Manchester (established in 1851) and the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (established in 1824) were formally merged into a single institution.

The university today

The Sackville Street Building, formerly known as UMIST Main building

The newly merged University of Manchester was officially launched on 22 October 2004 when the Queen handed over the Royal Charter. It has the largest number of full time students in the UK, unless the University of London is counted as a single university. It teaches more academic subjects than any other British university. The founding President and Vice-Chancellor of the new university was Alan Gilbert, former Vice-Chancellor of the University of Melbourne, who retired at the end of the 2009-2010 academic year.^[11] The current vice chancellor is Professor Dame Nancy Rothwell, who held a chair in physiology at the university since 1994. One of the university's aims stated in the Manchester 2015 Agenda is to be one of the top 25 universities in the world. This follows Alan Gilbert's aim for the university to 'establish it by 2015 among the 25 strongest research universities in the world on commonly accepted criteria of research excellence and performance'.^[12] Manchester has the largest total income of all UK universities, standing at £637 million as of 2007.^[6] Its research income of £216 million is the fifth largest of any university in the country.

Reputation

The university has a very high quality research profile. In the first national assessment of higher education research since the university’s founding, the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise, the University of Manchester came 3rd in terms of research power after Cambridge and Oxford and 6th for grade point average quality^[13] (8th when including specialist institutions).^[8] Accordingly, Manchester enjoys the largest amount of research funding behind Oxbridge, UCL and Imperial^[14] (these five universities being informally referred to as the 'golden diamond' of research-intensive UK institutions^[15]). Manchester also has a particularly strong presence in terms of funding from the three main UK research councils, EPSRC, MRC and BBSRC, being ranked 3rd^[16], 7th^[17] and 1st^[18] respectively. In addition, the university is also one of the richest in the UK in terms of income and interest from endowments: at a recent rank it was placed at 3rd place behind Oxbridge.^[19]

Historically, Manchester has been linked with high scientific achievement: the constituent former institutions combined have 23 Nobel Laureates among their former students and staff, the third largest number of any single university in the United Kingdom behind Oxford and Cambridge; in fact, excluding Oxbridge, Manchester has graduated more Nobel laureates than any other university in the UK. Furthermore, according to an academic poll two of the top ten discoveries by university academics and researchers were made at the University (namely the first working computer and the contraceptive pill)^[20].

The 2009 THE - QS World University Rankings (known from 2010 onwards as the QS World University Rankings) found Manchester overall 26th in the world and 5th by employer reviews by receiving a maximum 100% rating which the university has retained since 2008.^[21][22] The Academic Ranking of World Universities 2008 published by the Institute of Higher Education of Shanghai Jiao Tong University ranked Manchester 5th in the UK, 6th in Europe and 40th in the world.^[23] After several years of steady progress Manchester fell back in 2009 to 41st in the world and 7th in Europe.^[24] Excluding US universities, Manchester is ranked 13th and 11th in the world for 2009 by THES and ARWU respectively. According to the ARWU rankings the university is ranked 9th in Europe for natural sciences^[25] and 4th in engineering.^[26] Similarly the HEEACT 2009 rankings for scientific performance place Manchester 5th in Europe for engineering,^[27] 8th for natural sciences^[28] and 3rd for social sciences.^[29] And finally THES ranks Manchester 6th in Europe for technology,^[30] 10th for life sciences^[31] and 7th for social sciences.^[32]

According to the High Fliers Research Limited's survey, University of Manchester students are being targeted by more top recruiters for graduate vacancies than any other UK university students for three consecutive years (2007-2009).^[33][34] Furthermore the university has been ranked joint 20th in the world for 2009 according to the Professional Ranking of World Universities.^[35] Its main compilation criterion is the number of Chief Executive Officers (or number 1 executive equivalent) which are among the "500 leading worldwide companies" as measured by revenue who studied in each university. The ranking places the University only behind Oxford nationally. Also a further report places Manchester within the top 20 universities outside the US.^[36]

At a recent ranking undertaken by the Guardian, Manchester is placed 5th in the UK in international reputation behind the usual four: Oxbridge, UCL and Imperial.^[37] However, while as a rule world rankings (such as the ARWU, THES and HEEACT^[38]) typically place the university within the top 10 in Europe, national studies are less complementary; The Times 'Good University Guide 2011’^[39] ranked Manchester 30th out of 113 Universities in the UK, ‘The Complete University Guide’2011 in association with The Independent placed it at 31st out of 115 universities^[40] whilst ‘The Guardian University Guide 2011’ ranked Manchester at 51st out of 118 universities in the UK.^[41] This apparent paradox is mainly a reflection of the different ranking methodologies employed by each listing: global rankings focus on research and international prestige, whereas national rankings are largely based on teaching and the student experience.

Campus and facilities

One Central Park

The main site of the University contains the vast majority of its facilities and is often referred to simply as campus. Despite this, Manchester is not a campus university as the concept is commonly understood. It is centrally located and the buildings of the main site are integrated into the fabric of Manchester, with non-university buildings and major roads between them.

Campus occupies an area shaped roughly like a boot: the foot of the boot is aligned roughly south-west to north-east and is joined to the broader southern part of the boot by an area of overlap between former UMIST and former VUM buildings;^[42] like the Americas, it comprises two parts:

• North campus, centred on Sackville Street
• South campus, centred on Oxford Road.

These names are not officially recognised by the University, but are commonly used, including in parts of its website; another usage is Sackville Street Campus and Oxford Road Campus. They roughly correspond to the campuses of the old UMIST and Victoria University respectively, although there was already some overlap before the merger.

Fallowfield Campus is the main residential campus of the University. It is located in Fallowfield, approximately 2 miles (3 km) south of the main site.

There are a number of other university buildings located throughout the city and the wider region, such as One Central Park (in the northern suburb of Moston)^[43] and Jodrell Bank Observatory (in the nearby county of Cheshire). The former is a collaboration between Manchester University and other partners in the region which offers office space to accommodate new start-up firms as well as venues for conferences and workshops.

Despite its size The University of Manchester is divided into only four faculties, each sub-divided into schools:

• Faculty of Medical and Human Sciences consisting of the Schools of Medicine; Dentistry; Nursing, Midwifery and Social Work; Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences; and Psychological Sciences.
• Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences consisting of the Schools of Chemical Engineering and Analytical Science; Chemistry; Computer Science; Earth, Atmospheric and Environmental Science; Physics and Astronomy; Electrical & Electronic Engineering; Materials; Mathematics; and Mechanical, Aerospace and Civil Engineering.
• Faculty of Humanities includes the School of Arts, Histories and Cultures (incorporating Archaeology; Art History & Visual Studies; Classics and Ancient History; Drama; English and American Studies; History; Museology; Music; and Religions and Theology). The other Schools are Combined Studies; Education; Environment and Development; Architecture; Languages, Linguistics and Cultures; Law; Social Sciences and the Manchester Business School.
• Faculty of Life Sciences unusually consisting of a single school.

Major projects

The atrium inside the new £38m Manchester Interdisciplinary Biocentre

Following the merger, the University embarked on a £600 million programme of capital investment, to deliver eight new buildings and 15 major refurbishment projects by 2010, partly financed by a sale of unused assets.^[44] These include:

• £60 m Flagship University Place building
• £56 m Alan Turing Building: housing Mathematics, the Photon Sciences Institute and the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics.
• £50 m Life Sciences Research Building (A.V. Hill Building)
• £38 m Manchester Interdisciplinary Biocentre (MIB)
• £33 m Life Sciences and Medical and Human Sciences Building (Michael Smith Building)
• £31 m Humanities Building - now officially called the "Arthur Lewis Building"
• £20 m Wolfson Molecular Imaging Centre (WMIC)
• £18 m Re-location of School of Pharmacy
• £17 m John Rylands Library, Deansgate
• £13 m Chemistry Building
• £10 m Functional Biology Building

John Rylands University Library

The John Rylands Library, from Deansgate: Spinningfield Square to left

The university's library, the John Rylands University Library, is the largest non-legal deposit library in the UK, as well as being the UK's third-largest academic library after those of Oxford and Cambridge.^[45] It also has the largest collection of electronic resources of any library in the UK.^[45]

The oldest part of the library, the John Rylands Library, founded in memory of John Rylands by his wife Enriqueta Augustina Rylands as an independent institution, is situated in a Victorian Gothic building on Deansgate, Manchester city centre. This site houses an important collection of historic books and other printed materials, manuscripts, including archives and papyri. The papyri are in various ancient languages and include the oldest extant New Testament document, Rylands Library Papyrus P52, commonly known as the St John Fragment. In April 2007 the Deansgate site reopened to readers and the public, following major improvements and renovations, including the construction of the pitched roof originally intended and a new wing in Spinningfield.

Jodrell Bank Observatory

The 76 m Lovell Telescope at Jodrell Bank Observatory.

The Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics is a combination of the astronomical academic staff, situated in Manchester, and the Jodrell Bank Observatory near Goostrey, about ten miles (16 km) west of Macclesfield. The observatory boasts the third largest fully-movable radio telescope in the world, the Lovell Telescope, constructed in the 1950s. It has played an important role in the research of quasars, pulsars and gravitational lenses, and has played a role in confirming Einstein's theory of General Relativity.

Manchester Museum

The modern entrance of the Manchester Museum

The Manchester Museum provides access to nearly 4.25 million^[46] items sourced from around the world. Collections include butterflies and carvings from India, birds and bark-cloth from the Pacific, live frogs and ancient pottery from America, fossils and native art from Australia, mammals and ancient Egyptian craftsmanship from Africa, plants, coins and minerals from Europe, art from past civilisations of the Mediterranean, and beetles, armour and archery from Asia. In November 2004, the museum acquired a cast of a fossilised Tyrannosaurus rex called "Stan".

The history of the museum goes back to 1821, when the first collections were assembled by the Manchester Society of Natural History and later added by the collections of the Manchester Geological Society. Due to financial difficulties and on the advice of the great evolutionary biologist Thomas Huxley, Owens College accepted responsibility for the collections in 1867. The college commissioned Alfred Waterhouse, the architect of London’s Natural History Museum, to design a museum to house these collections for the benefit of students and the public on a new site in Oxford Road. The Manchester Museum was finally opened to the public in the late 1880s.^[47]

Whitworth Art Gallery

The Whitworth Art Gallery

The Whitworth Art Gallery is home to collections of internationally famous British watercolours, textiles and wallpapers, as well as modern and historic prints, drawings, paintings and sculpture. It overall contains 31,000 items in its collection. A programme of temporary exhibitions runs throughout the year, with the Mezzanine Court serving as a venue for showing sculpture. It was founded by Robert Darbishire with a donation from Sir Joseph Whitworth in 1889, as The Whitworth Institute and Park. 70 years later the gallery became official part of the University of Manchester.^[48] In October 1995 a Mezzanine Court in the centre of the building was opened. This new gallery, designed chiefly for the display of sculptures, won a RIBA regional award.

Manchester University Press

Manchester University Press is an academic publishing house which exists as part of the university. It publishes academic monographs as well as textbooks and journals, the majority of which are works from authors based elsewhere in the international academic community, and is the third largest university press in England after Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press.

Contact Theatre

The Contact Theatre

The Old Quadrangle

The Contact Theatre largely stages modern live performance and participatory work for younger audiences. The present fortress-style building on Devas Street was completed in 1999 but incorporates parts of its 1960s predecessor.^[49] It features a unique energy-efficient system, using its high towers to naturally ventilate the building without the use of air conditioning. The colourful and curvaceous interior houses three performance spaces, a lounge bar and Hot Air, a reactive public artwork in the foyer.

Old Quadrangle

The buildings around the Old Quadrangle date from the time of Owens College, and were designed in a Gothic style by Alfred Waterhouse (and his son Paul Waterhouse). The first to be built (in 1873) was the John Owens Building (formerly the Main Building: the others were added over the next thirty years. In fact, the Rear Quadrangle is older than the Old Quadrangle. Today, the museum continues to occupy part of one side (including the tower) and the grand setting of the Whitworth Hall is used for the conferment of degrees. Part of the old Christie Library (1898) now houses Christie's Bistro, and the remainder of the buildings house administrative departments.

Chancellors Hotel and Conference Centre

Chancellors Hotel & Conference Centre

Formerly named The Firs, the original house was built in 1850 for Sir Joseph Whitworth by Edward Walters, who was also responsible for Manchester’s Free Trade Hall and Strangeways Prison. Whitworth used The Firs mainly as a social, political and business base, entertaining radicals of the age such as John Bright, Richard Cobden, William Forster and T.H. Huxley at the time of the Reform Bill of 1867. Whitworth, credited with raising the art of machine-tool building to a previously-unknown level, supported the new Mechanics Institute in Manchester – the birthplace of UMIST - and helped to found the Manchester School of Design. Whilst living in the house, Whitworth used land to the rear (now the site of the University's botanical glasshouses) for testing his "Whitworth rifle". In 1882, the Firs was leased to C.P. Scott, Editor of the Manchester Guardian. After Scott's death the house became the property of Owens College, and was the Vice-Chancellor's residence until 1991. The old house now forms the western wing of Chancellors Hotel & Conference Centre at the University. The newer eastern wing houses the circular Flowers Theatre, six individual conference rooms and the majority of the 75 hotel bedrooms.

Moreover, the University owns and operate the Manchester Conference Centre on Sackville Street that offers conference facilities in its two theatres (seating up to 300) and 19 seminar rooms.^[50]

Residential accommodation

Ashburne Hall, a catered accommodation offered mainly to undergraduate students, though some places are reserved for postgraduate students

Before they merged, the two former universities had for some time been sharing their residential facilities.

Main Campus

Whitworth Park Halls of Residence

These halls are owned by the University of Manchester and house 1,085 students of that university.^[51] It is most notable for the unique triangular shape of the accommodation blocks which gave rise to the nickname of "Toblerones", after the chocolate bar.

The designer of these unique 'Toblerone' shaped buildings took his inspiration from the hill which has been there since 1962, when as a result of a nearby archaeological dig (led by John Gater) the hill was created from the excavated soil. A consequence of this triangular design was a much reduced cost for the contracted construction company. Due to a deal struck between the University and Manchester City Council, which meant that the council would pay for the roofs of all student residential buildings in the area, Allan Pluen's team is believed to have saved thousands on the final cost of the halls. They were built in the mid 1970s.

Dilworth House, one of the Whitworth Park halls of residence

The site of the halls was previously occupied by many small streets whose names have been preserved in the names given to the halls. Grove House is a much older building and has been used by the University for many different purposes over the last sixty years. Its first occupants in 1951 were the Appointments Board and the Manchester University Press.^[52] The shops in Thorncliffe Place were part of the same plan and include banks and a convenience store.

Notable persons associated with the halls include: Friedrich Engels whose residence on the site is commemorated by a blue plaque on Aberdeen House; the physicist Brian Cox; Irene Khan, Secretary general of Amnesty International; and Big Brother winner Omar Chaparro.

Sackville Street

The former UMIST Campus has five halls of residence near to Sackville Street building (Weston, Lambert, Fairfield, Chandos, and Wright Robinson), and several other halls within a 5-15 minute walk away, such as the Grosvenor group of halls.

Other accommodation

The former Moberly Tower has been demolished. There are also Vaughan House (once the home of the clergy serving the Church of the Holy Name); Crawford House and Devonshire House adjacent to the Manchester Business School and Victoria Hall in Higher Cambridge Street.

Fallowfield and Victoria Park Campuses

The Fallowfield Campus, situated 2 miles (3.2 km) south of the main university campus (the Oxford Road Campus), is the largest of the university's residential campuses. The Owens Park group of halls with its landmark tower lies at the centre of it, while Oak House is another large hall of residence. Woolton Hall is also on the Fallowfield campus next to Oak House. Allen Hall is a traditional hall situated near Ashburne Hall (Sheavyn House being annexed to Ashburne). Richmond Park is also a relatively recent addition to the campus.

Victoria Park Campus, comprises several halls of residence. Among these are St Anselm Hall with Canterbury Court, Dalton-Ellis Hall (with Pankhurst Court), Hulme Hall (including Burkhardt House), St Gabriel's Hall and Opal Gardens Hall.

Clubs and societies

See also: University of Manchester Students' Union: Societies

The University's Boat Club is one of many Athletic Union Clubs that Manchester offers [1]

Athletics and outdoor games

Unlike some universities The University of Manchester operates its own sports clubs via the Athletics Union. Student societies on the other hand are operated by the Students' Union.

Today the university can boast more than 80 health and fitness classes while over 3,000 students are members of the 44 various Athletic Union clubs. The sports societies in Manchester vary widely in their level and scope. Many of the more popular sports have several university teams as well as departmental teams which may be placed in a league against other teams within the university. Common teams include: lacrosse, korfball, dodgeball, hockey, rugby league, rugby union, football, basketball, netball and cricket. The Manchester Aquatics Centre, the swimming pool used for the Manchester Commonwealth Games is also on the campus.

The university competes annually in 28 different sports against Leeds and Liverpool universities in the Christie Cup, which Manchester has won for seven consecutive years.^[53] The university has also achieved considerable success in the BUCS (British University & College Sports) competitions. It is currently positioned in 8th place in the overall BUCS rankings for 2009/10^[54] The Christie Cup is an inter-university competition between Liverpool, Leeds and Manchester in numerous sports since 1886. After the Oxford and Cambridge rivalry, the Christie's Championships is the oldest Inter–University competition on the sporting calendar: the cup was a benefaction of Richard Copley Christie.

Every year elite sportsmen and sportswomen at the university are selected for membership of the XXI Club, a society that was formed in 1932 and exists to promote sporting excellence at the university. Most members have gained a Full Maroon for representing the university and many have excelled at a British Universities or National level.

Political activity, social sciences and performing arts

Manchester also has a reputation for producing many active members of the Labour Party.^[55] Former students have included Phil Woolas, John Mann, Margaret Beckett and Liam Byrne.

Manchester has the largest degree programme in the country in the School of Social Sciences. It has a unique degree programme under the umbrella name of BA(Econ and Social Sciences). It is a multidisciplinary degree designed to give you maximum flexibility and choice. Within it, you can specialise in, or combine it with, other social science disciplines, such as economics, business studies, politics, or sociology. The course is fortunate by having a long, distinguished history in Economics, with a Chair in Political Economy founded at Manchester in 1854. There is an extensive choice of course units, thanks to the significant diversity of interests of our staff.

The BA(Econ and Social Sciences) programme has its own society, BA Econ Society, the largest course-based society in the country. The society boasts around 1000 active members offering a variety of opportunities including different socials (from bar crawls to BBQs, from trips to Alton Towers to nights out in neighbouring cities), career events (with a long list of corporate sponsors and array of development, political and government-based links), a large international offering for students new to the UK, an annual trip abroad and huge Summer Ball. The society is one of the most established at the university with strong representative sports teams (hockey, football, netball and rugby) and good links with the academic staff at the School of Social Sciences.

In addition to this the university is also home to Manchester University Music Society (MUMS) which promotes many classical and jazz ensembles including MUWO (Manchester University Wind Orchestra), a large wind orchestra whose members include present students, alumni and other wind players in the Manchester area. The band were awarded Gold at the National Concert Band Festival at The Sage Gateshead in 2007 and again at Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama in 2009. In 2008 the University of Manchester Symphony Orchestra (a MUMS ensemble) was a finalist in the inter-University Symphony orchestra competition SymphUni. In 2009 MUMS appointed Sir Peter Maxwell Davies to be their patron.

University Challenge

The university has done particularly well in recent years on BBC2 quiz program, University Challenge. In 2006, Manchester beat Trinity Hall, Cambridge to record the university's first triumph in the competition. The year after, the university finished in 2nd place after losing out to the University of Warwick in the final. The team has progressed to the semi finals every year since 2005.

In 2009, the team battled hard in the final against Corpus Christi College, Oxford. At the gong, the score was 275 - 190 to Corpus Christi College after an extraordinary performance from Gail Trimble. However, the title was eventually given to the University of Manchester after it was discovered that Corpus Christi team member Sam Kay had graduated 8 months before the final was broadcast, and the team was disqualified.

Manchester reached the semi-finals in the 2010 competition before being beaten by Emmanuel College, Cambridge.

NHS hospitals

Old Medical School on Coupland Street (photographed in 1908), which now houses the School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences

The Manchester Medical School, established in 1874, is one of the largest in the country,^[56] with over 400 medical students being trained in each of the clinical years and over 350 students in the pre-clinical/phase 1 years. Approximately 100 students who have completed pre-clinical training at the Bute Medical School (University of St Andrews) join the third year of the undergraduate medical programme each year.

The university's Faculty of Medical and Human Sciences has links with a large number of NHS hospitals in the North West of England and maintains presences in its four base hospitals: Manchester Royal Infirmary (located at the southern end of the main university campus on Oxford Road), Wythenshawe Hospital, Hope Hospital and the Royal Preston Hospital. All are used for clinical medical training for doctors and nurses.

The School of Pharmacy at Manchester University also benefits from the university's links with the Manchester Royal Infirmary and Wythenshawe and Hope hospitals. All of the undergraduate pharmacy students gain hospital experience through these links and are the only pharmacy students in the UK to have an extensive course completed in secondary care.^[57]

Moreover, the university is a founding partner of the Manchester Academic Health Science Centre, established to focus high-end healthcare research in Greater Manchester.^[58]

Notable academic staff and alumni

Many notable and famous people have worked or studied at one or both of the two former institutions that merged to form the University of Manchester, including 23 Nobel prize laureates. Some of the best known include John Dalton (founder of modern atomic theory), Ludwig Wittgenstein (considered the one of the most significant philosophers of the 20th Century), George E. Davis (founded the discipline of Chemical Engineering), Bernard Lovell (a pioneer of radio astronomy), Alan Turing (one of the founders of computer science and artificial intelligence), Irene Khan (current secretary general of Amnesty International) and Robert Bolt (two times Academy Award winner and three times Golden Globe winner for screenwriting Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago). Additionally, a number of politicians are associated with the university, including the current Presidents of Belize, Iceland and Trinidad and Tobago, as well as several ministers among others in the United Kingdom, Malaysia, Canada and Singapore and also Chaim Weizmann, a chemist and the first President of Israel.

Nobel prize winners

Overall, there have been 23 Nobel Prizes awarded to staff and students past and present, with some of the most important discoveries of the modern ages being discovered in Manchester.

Chemistry

• Ernest Rutherford (awarded Nobel prize in 1908), for his investigations into the disintegration of the elements and the chemistry of radioactive substances (He was the first to probe the atom).
• Arthur Harden (awarded Nobel prize in 1929), for investigations on the fermentation of sugar and fermentative enzymes.
• Walter Haworth (awarded Nobel prize in 1937), for his investigations on carbohydrates and vitamin C.
• Robert Robinson (awarded Nobel prize in 1947), for his investigations on plant products of biological importance, especially the alkaloids.
• Alexander Todd (awarded Nobel prize in 1957), for his work on nucleotides and nucleotide co-enzymes.
• Melvin Calvin (awarded Nobel prize in 1961), for his research on the carbon dioxide assimilation in plants.
• John Charles Polanyi (awarded Nobel prize in 1986), for his contributions concerning the dynamics of chemical elementary processes.
• Michael Smith (awarded Nobel prize in 1993), for his fundamental contributions to the establishment of oligonucleotide-based, site-directed mutagenesis and its development for protein studies.

Physics

• Joseph John (J. J.) Thomson (awarded Nobel prize in 1906), in recognition of the great merits of his theoretical and experimental investigations on the conduction of electricity by gases.
• William Lawrence Bragg (awarded Nobel prize in 1915), for his services in the analysis of crystal structure by means of X-rays.
• Niels Bohr (awarded Nobel prize in 1922), for his fundamental contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum mechanics.
• Charles Thomson Rees (C. T. R.) Wilson (awarded Nobel prize in 1927), for his method of making the paths of electrically charged particles visible by condensation of vapour.
• James Chadwick (awarded Nobel prize in 1935), for the discovery of the neutron.
• George de Hevesy (awarded Nobel prize in 1943), for his work on the use of isotopes as tracers in the study of chemical processes.
• Patrick M. Blackett (awarded Nobel prize in 1948), for developing cloud chamber and confirming/discovering positron.
• Sir John Douglas Cockcroft (awarded Nobel prize in 1951), for his pioneer work on the splitting of atomic nuclei by artificially accelerated atomic particles and also for his contribution to modern nuclear power.
• Hans Bethe (awarded Nobel prize in 1967), for his contributions to the theory of nuclear reactions, especially his discoveries concerning the energy production in stars.
• Nevill Francis Mott (awarded Nobel prize in 1977), for his fundamental theoretical investigations of the electronic structure of magnetic and disordered systems.

Physiology and Medicine

• Archibald Vivian Hill (awarded Nobel prize in 1922), for his discovery relating to the production of heat in the muscle. One of the founders of the diverse disciplines of biophysics and operations research.
• Sir John Sulston (awarded Nobel prize in 2002), for his discoveries concerning 'genetic regulation of organ development and programmed cell death'. In 2007, Sulston was announced as Chair of the newly-founded Institute for Science, Ethics and Innovation (iSEI) at the University of Manchester.^[59]

Economics

• John Hicks (awarded Nobel prize in 1974), for his pioneering contributions to general economic equilibrium theory and welfare theory.
• Sir Arthur Lewis (awarded Nobel prize in 1979), for his pioneering research into economic development research with particular consideration of the problems of developing countries.
• Joseph E. Stiglitz (awarded Nobel prize in 2001), for his analyses of markets with asymmetric information. Currently, Professor Joseph E. Stiglitz heads the Brooks World Poverty Institute (BWPI) at the University of Manchester.

See also

• Offshoring Research Network
• Third oldest university in England debate

Notes

External links

• "Official page of the University of Manchester". http://www.manchester.ac.uk. 
• "Official page of the University of Manchester Incubator Company/UMIC". http://www.umic.co.uk. 
• "Official page of the University of Manchester Intellectual Property/UMIP". http://www.umip.com. 

University of Manchester Faculties Engineering and Physical Sciences · Humanities · Life Sciences · Medical and Human Sciences Schools Business · Chemical Engineering and Analytical Sciences · Computer Science · Materials · Mathematics · Mechanical, Aerospace and Civil Engineering · Medicine · Physics and Astronomy · Psychology Centres Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics · Manchester Centre for Integrative Systems Biology · Manchester Institute of Innovation Research · Manchester Centre for New Writing · Research Computing Services · Manchester Interdisciplinary Biocentre · Wolfson Molecular Imaging Centre · Manchester School of Architecture Institutes Brooks World Poverty Institute · Institute for Science, Ethics and Innovation Buildings Alan Turing Building · Arthur Lewis Building · Barnes Wallis Building · Faraday Building · Maths and Social Sciences Building · Renold Building · Sackville Street Building · Schuster Laboratory · Stephen Joseph Studio · Stopford Building · Whitworth Hall Facilities Chancellors Hotel & Conference Centre · Contact Theatre · Firs Botanical Grounds · Godlee Observatory · Jodrell Bank Observatory · John Rylands Library · John Rylands University Library · Manchester Academy · Manchester Aquatics Centre · Manchester Conference Centre · Manchester Museum · Tabley House · UMIST linear system · Whitworth Art Gallery Halls of residence Allen Hall · Dalton-Ellis Hall · Fallowfield Campus · Hulme Hall · Oak House · Owens Park · St. Anselm Hall · St Gabriel's Hall · Whitworth Park  · Wright Robinson Hall History University of Manchester · UMIST · Victoria University of Manchester · Victoria University Alumni People associated with the University of Manchester