The University of California, Berkeley is a public research university located in Berkeley, California. The university occupies 1,232 acres on the eastern side of the San Francisco Bay with the central campus resting on 178 acres.Berkeley is the flagship institution of the 10 campus University of California system and one of only two UC campuses operating on a semester calendar, the other being UC Merced.
Established in 1868 as the result of the merger of the private College of California and the public Agricultural, Mining, and Mechanical Arts College in Oakland, Berkeley is the oldest institution in the UC system and offers approximately 350 undergraduate and graduate degree programs in a wide range of disciplines. Berkeley has been charged with providing both “classical” and “practical” education for the state’s people. Berkeley co-manages three United States Department of Energy National Laboratories, including the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory for the U.S. Department of Energy.
Berkeley faculty, alumni, and researchers have won 72 Nobel Prizes (including 30 alumni Nobel laureates), 9 Wolf Prizes, 7 Fields Medals, 15 Turing Awards, 45 MacArthur Fellowships, 20 Academy Awards, and 11 Pulitzer Prizes. To date, UC Berkeley and its researchers are associated with 6 chemical elements of the periodic table (californium, seaborgium, berkelium, einsteinium, fermium, lawrencium) and the Berkeley Lab has discovered 16 chemical elements in total – more than any other university in the world. Berkeley is a founding member of the Association of American Universities and continues to have very high research activity with $652.4 million in research and development expenditures in 2009. Berkeley physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer was the scientific director of the Manhattan Project that developed the first atomic bomb in the world, which he personally headquartered at Los Alamos, New Mexico, during World War II. Faculty member Edward Teller was (together with Stanislaw Ulam) the “father of the hydrogen bomb”. Known as the California Golden Bears (often shortened to “Cal Bears” or just “Cal”), the athletic teams are members of both the Pacific-12 Conference and the Mountain Pacific Sports Federation in the NCAA.
