The University of Washington has moved up two spots to No. 8 in the latest ranking of Best Global Universities from U.S. News & World Report, beating out such prestigious institutions as Princeton, Yale and Johns Hopkins.
The UW held onto its No. 2 ranking among U.S. public institutions and also landed in the top 10 in several subject areas that were ranked, including computer science.
“We are proud to be consistently recognized for the excellence and impact of our scholarship across so many subjects,” UW President Ana Mari Cauce said in a statement. “It’s especially gratifying to see the work of outstanding programs like infectious diseases and immunology listed among the very best in the world at a time when we need discovery and innovation in these areas more than ever.”
Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, University of California-Berkeley, University of Oxford, Columbia University, and California Institute of Technology are the seven schools which placed ahead of UW.
“UW is the Stanford of the Pacific Northwest both in the quality of the research and education and in seeding startups, as we pointed out,” said Oren Etzioni, CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence and a professor in the UW computer science department, in referencing a GeekWire piece he co-wrote last year on Seattle’s startup ecosystem.
Etzioni and Jacob Colker, managing director of the AI2 Incubator in Seattle, said last October that there has also been tremendous private investment into UW over just the last few years, and that it will pay huge dividends to the city’s ecosystem for decades.
“The best is yet to come!” Etzioni told GeekWire on Wednesday.
Here are all of the UW’s subject rankings according to U.S. News, with those in the top 10 listed below:
- Geosciences – No. 5
- Clinical medicine – No. 6
- Immunology – No. 6
- Infectious diseases – No. 6
- Molecular biology and genetics – No. 6
- Surgery – No. 6
- Social sciences and public health – No. 7
- Microbiology – No. 8
- Pharmacology and toxicology – No. 8
- Computer science – No. 9
The Best Global Universities ranking, now in its sixth year, encompasses the top 1,500 institutions spread across 81 countries, up from 75 countries last year, according to UW News, citing a press release from U.S. News.
The ranking methodology — which is based on Web of Science data and metrics provided by Clarivate Analytics InCites — weighs factors that measure a university’s global and regional research reputation and academic research performance. For the overall rankings, this includes bibliometric indicators such as publications, citations and international collaboration.
