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  • Stole of GratitudeUC Santa Barbara ranks among higher-education leaders in the United States and Canada as one of only 61 research-intensive institutions elected to membership in the prestigious Association of American Universities.
  • U.S. News and World Report’s guide, “America’s Best Colleges,” the most widely read college guide in the country, ranks UCSB number 10 among all public universities.
  • UCSB’s renowned faculty includes five winners of Nobel Prizes for landmark research in chemistry, physics, and economics, and scores of elected members of national and international academies and societies. An alumna of the College of Creative Studies was named 2009 Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine.
  • Demand for admission to UCSB is keen, and the academic quality and diversity of the applicant class are high. Fall 2013 applications from prospective freshmen and transfer students totaled 76,025, or 14 percent more than last year.
  • The campus is home to 11 national institutes and centers, including eight that are supported by the National Science Foundation. Among them: the renowned Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics and the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis.
  • External support for research, which is considered the lifeblood of a premier research university, totaled a record $222 million in fiscal 2009-10, a 28 percent increase over the previous year. Federal agencies provided $192 million of the total, nearly $58 million more than the preceding year.
  • Over half of all graduating seniors collaborate with faculty members on original research or creative projects. The campus nurtures such activities with a program of student grants totaling $200,000 annually.
  • The Campaign for UC Santa Barbara has thus far raised more than $700 million to ensure the excellence of the campus and its programs for future generations.
  • The Koegel Autism Center at the Gevirtz Graduate School of Education has been recognized by the National Research Council as one of the top 10 state-of-the-art treatment centers for autism in the United States.
  • UCSB is leading the MacArthur Foundation’s $10-million national program on the law and neuroscience, the first systematic effort to bridge the fields of law and neuroscience in considering how courts should deal with new brain-scanning techniques as they apply to matters of law.
  • The university is the editorial headquarters for The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau, a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) project that is publishing definitive scholarly editions of the complete works of naturalist and literary artist Henry David Thoreau. The Thoreau Edition has been designated an NEH “We the People” project because of the importance of Thoreau’s writings in American history and culture.
  • The UCSB Libraries have opened up the world of historic sound recordings by mounting thousands of digitized cylinder recordings on an immensely popular Web site: http://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu.
  • The campus is home to the California NanoSystems Institute, one of the first California Institutes for Science and Innovation. A research partnership with UCLA, the institute is on its way to creating revolutionary new materials, devices, and systems that will enhance virtually every aspect of our lives.
  • A new interdisciplinary Institute for Energy Efficiency established by the College of Engineering is bringing together more than 50 campus researchers with related expertise to develop new energy-saving technologies. The institute’s Center for Energy Efficient Materials was awarded a grant of $19 million by the Department of Energy.
  • UC Santa Barbara and the Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute have established a joint Center for Nanomedicine to pioneer the development of novel biomedical research technologies for advancing human health.
  • Researchers at UC Santa Barbara led by Shuji Nakamura were responsible for a major breakthrough in laser diode development and demonstrated the world’s first nonpolar blue-violet laser diodes, which have numerous commercial and medical applications.
  • The UCSB laboratory of physicist Paul Hansma is considered the birthplace of practical scanning microscopes, especially atomic force microscopes, which today are ubiquitous in laboratories all over the world.
  • UC Santa Barbara is the largest employer in the county and a primary engine of economic activity on the South Coast. More than 80 local companies have been established by UCSB faculty and alumni, and four to seven new companies based on UCSB research are formed every year. In addition, 66 companies on four continents (30 in California) are currently using technologies developed at UCSB.
  • Bren Hall, which houses the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management, and the Tipton Meeting House at the Sedgwick Natural Reserve are among the “greenest” buildings in the nation, earning LEED Platinum certification — the highest sustainability rating possible — from the U.S. Green Building Council.
  • UCSB’s pioneering work on climate change is often cited by other researchers. The Institute for Scientific Information recently measured the impact of climate change research citations over a 10-year span and ranked the campus number 7 worldwide.