University of Sheffield

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The University of Sheffield is a research university, located in Sheffield in South Yorkshire, England.

[edit] History

The University of Sheffield was originally formed by the merger of three colleges. The Sheffield School of Medicine was founded in 1828, 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.

Firth Court

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.

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 although 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.

[edit] Location

The Arts Tower. In recent years the windows of south facing facade have occasionally been blanked out with paper to form massive advertisements for charity campaigns.

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 and Richard Roberts Buildings (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 (the A57) allows students to easily move between these buildings.

To the 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 old Victorian Jessop Hospital for Women buildings and HSE Building and plans to convert these to house more departments, thus fully joining the West and St. George's campuses.

The Crookesmoor Building, home of the Faculty of Law

Further west lies Weston Park parkland, the Weston Park Museum, the Harold Cantor Gallery, sports facilities and the faculties of law in the Crookesmoor area and medicine, in the Royal Hallamshire Hospital (although taught in the city's extensive teaching hospitals under the Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, and throughout South Yorkshire and North East Lincolnshire).

Further west still lie the University halls of residence, Ranmoor House, Halifax Hall of Residence, Stephenson Hall of Residence and Tapton Hall of Residence, and the music department, in the Broomhill and Crookes areas of the city.

The Manvers campus, at Wath-on-Dearne between Rotherham and Barnsley, is where the majority of nursing is taught.

[edit] Organisation

The University of Sheffield's coat of arms, granted when the University received its Royal Charter in 1905, on which the University's current logo is based

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:

• Faculty of Architectural Studies
  • School of Architecture
  • Landscape
  • Town and Regional Planning
• Faculty of Arts
  • Archaeology
  • Biblical Studies
  • School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics
    • National Centre for English Cultural Tradition
  • History
  • Music
  • Philosophy
  • School of Modern Languages and Linguistics
    • French
    • Germanic Studies
    • Hispanic Studies
    • Modern Languages Teaching Centre
    • Russian and Slavonic Studies
• Faculty of Engineering
  • Automatic Control and Systems Engineering
  • Chemical and Process Engineering
  • Civil and Structural Engineering
  • Computer Science
  • Electronic and Electrical Engineering
  • Engineering Materials
  • Mechanical Engineering
    • Aerospace Engineering
  • Medical Physics and Clinical Engineering
• Faculty of Law
  • Law
• Faculty of Medicine
  • Human Communication Sciences
  • School of Clinical Dentistry
  • School of Health and Related Research
  • School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences
    • Academic Unit of Medical Education
    • Division of Genomic Medicine
    • Division of Clinical Sciences North
    • Division of Clinical Sciences South
    • Sheffield Institute for Studies on Ageing (SISA)
  • School of Nursing and Midwifery
  • Sheffield Palliative Care Studies Group
• Faculty of Pure Science
  • Animal and Plant Sciences
  • Archaeology
  • Biomedical Science
  • Chemistry
  • Computer Science
  • Geography
    • Sorby Geology Group
  • Information Studies
  • Medicine and Pharmacology
  • Molecular Biology and Biotechnology
  • Physics and Astronomy
  • Psychology
  • School of Mathematics and Statistics
    • Applied Mathematics
    • Probability and Statistics
    • Pure Mathematics
• Faculty of Social Sciences
  • School of East Asian Studies
  • Economics
  • Education
  • Geography
  • History
  • Human Communication Sciences
  • Information Studies
  • Institute for Lifelong Learning
  • Journalism
  • Management School
  • Politics
  • Psychology
    • Clinical Psychology
    • Institute of Work Psychology
  • Sociological Studies

[edit] 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.

The Route 57 logo, designed by Tom Szekeres.

Sheffield is particularly famous for its Archaeology, Architecture, Chemistry, Engineering, English, History, 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.

Route 57 is an online literary magazine published annually by the Department of English Literature, and is funded by CILASS, the University's Center for inquiry-based learning in the Arts and Social Sciences. Edited by a team of University staff and students, the webzine features original poetry, fiction, non-fiction, experimental writing, and drama.

[edit] 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:

• (1953 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, Prof. Hans Adolf Krebs, "for the discovery of the citric acid cycle in cellular respiration")

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 Physiology 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.

[edit] 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.

[edit] Students' Union, Sports and Traditions

The University of Sheffield Union of Students is one of 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), the cinema Film Unit, 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, The Steel Press, which is normally printed every fortnight, and an online newspaper, sheffieldbase.com.

Left to right: the Hicks Building, students' union/University House (conjoined), walkway to the Octagon Centre and the Education Building (in background)

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 Jump[2] pub 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.[3] The roleplaying society run a 24 hour roleplaying event on RAG weekend. Another rag week tradition is the Spiderwalk, a fifty mile trek through the city and the Peak District, the first half through the night. Although publication has been sporadic in recent years, Twikker, the Rag Magazine, is usually sold to raise funds.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Notable alumni

See also Category:Alumni of the University of Sheffield.

• Sir Donald Bailey, civil engineer and inventor of the Bailey bridge
• Carol Barnes, newsreader
• Edward H Ntalami, Chief Executive, Capital Markets Authority, Kenya
• David Blunkett, politician (BA(Hons) Political Theory and Institutions, 1972)
• David Childs, Clifford Chance Managing Partner
• Stephen Daldry, film director
• David Davies, Football Association chief executive
• John Devaney, Chairman, Marconi PLC
• Martin Fry, lead singer of ABC
• Nicci Gerrard, author
• Joanne Harris, author (later became faculty)
• Penny Hughes, former president of Coca-Cola Enterprises (UK) (BSc(Hons) Chemistry)
• Eddie Izzard, comedian
• Amy Johnson, pilot (BA(Hons) Economics, 1926)
• The Rt Hon. Lord Justice Maurice Kay, Lord Justice of Appeal
• Sir Hans Kornberg, biochemist
• Harold Kroto, Nobel Prize-winning chemist (BSc(Hons) Chemistry, 1961; PhD, 1961-1964)
• Vanessa Lawrence, Ordnance Survey director general
• Dame Julia Macur, High Court judge
• Rudo Makunike, Zimbabwean paediatric pathologist
• Sir Peter Middleton, Camelot chairman
• Tony Miles, Britain's first chess grand master
• John O'Leary, Times Higher Education Supplement editor
• Dame Anne Rafferty, High Court judge
• Richard Roberts, Nobel Prize-winning geneticist (BSc(Hons) Chemistry, 1965; PhD, 1968)
• Jack Rosenthal, playwright
• Helen Sharman, astronaut (BSc(Hons) Chemistry, 1984)
• Rachel Shelley, actress (BA(Hons) English and Drama)
• Linda Smith, comedian
• Ann Taylor, politician
• David Wetherall, footballer
• Dato' Arifin Zakaria , Federal Court Judge of Malaysia

[edit] Notable faculty

• Francis Berry, poet and literary critic
• Professor Peter Blundell Jones, professor in architecture, author, historian and critic
• Angela Carter, author (1976-1978)
• Colin Renfrew, Baron Renfrew of Kaimsthorn, archaeologist
• Charles Eliot, Vice Chancellor
• William Empson, poet (The School of English named its facilities after him)
• Joanne Harris, author (2000; was also a student)
• Peter Hill, world famous pianist and expert on the works of Olivier Messiaen
• Prof David Hughes (Astronomer), Award winning Astronomer. Asteroid 4205 is named in his honour.
• Sir Ian Kershaw, historian
• Hans Adolf Krebs, Nobel Prize-winning biochemist (1935-1954)
• Stephen Laurence, philosopher and cognitive scientist
• David Marquand, politician
• Edward Mellanby, pharmacologist and discoverer of Vitamin D
• George Porter, Nobel Prize-winning chemist (1955-1966)
• Dominic Sandbrook, historian (2001-2004)
• William Sarjeant, geologist
• Professor W E S Turner (1881-1963), Eminent professor of Glass technology and founder of the Museum which bears his name
• Professor Sir James Underwood (? - ?), Joseph Hunter Professor of Pathology and Dean of the Faculty of Medicine.

[edit] Histories

There are two offical histories of the university

• Arthur W. Chapman (1955) The Story of a Modern University: A History of the University of Sheffield, Oxford University Press.
• Helen Mathers (2005) Steel City Scholars: The Centenary History of the University of Sheffield, London: James & James.

[edit] See also

• Sheffield Hallam University

[edit] External links

• University of Sheffield
• Sure Radio - Student Radio Station
• University of Sheffield Union of Students
• Film Unit - The Student Cinema
• Sheffield University Real Ale Society's Beer Festival
• The Floor - The University of Sheffield's politics and social affairs magazine
• Route 57