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- UC Santa Barbara ranks among higher-education leaders in the United States and Canada as one of only 63 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 9 among all public universities.
- Seven UC Santa Barbara graduate programs are ranked among the top 50 in the nation by U.S. News and World Report, and three departments are in the top 10: chemical engineering, materials, and physics.
- 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.
- The campus is home to 12 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.
- The campus’s Arts & Lectures Program, nationally recognized for artistic excellence, brings a diverse array of nearly 200 performances, cultural presentations, and educational and outreach events to the region each year.
- Over half of all graduating seniors have collaborated with faculty members on original research or creative projects. The campus nurtures such activities with a program of student grants totaling $200,000 annually. 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 2010 applications from prospective freshmen and transfer students totaled 58,992, or 7.7 percent more than last year. Among all UC campuses, Santa Barbara received the second-highest number of applications from California high school seniors.
- External support for research, which is considered the lifeblood of a premier research university, totaled $175 million in fiscal 2009. Federal agencies provided $150 million of the total, $12 million more than the preceding year.
- 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.
- The Campaign for UC Santa Barbara has thus far raised more than $570 million to ensure the excellence of the campus and its programs for future generations.
- 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 University Art Museum on campus boasts the nation’s most extensive and important archive of original materials related to Southern California architecture and design.
- The campus was the first in the country to offer a Ph.D. in Chicana and Chicano Studies.
- UC Santa Barbara has joined a select group of universities offering a Ph.D. in Feminist, Gender, or Women's Studies.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- A new interdisciplinary Institute for Energy Efficiency established by the College of Engineering is bringing together 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.
- The Environmental Studies program at UCSB, which marked its 40th anniversary this year, is one of the oldest and most successful undergraduate environmental programs in the world.
- Bren Hall, which houses the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management, was the first laboratory and classroom building in the United States to be awarded the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design platinum certification by the U.S. Green Building Council.
- Two programs in the Department of Economics — environmental economics and experimental economics — have been ranked among the top 10 in the nation by Research Papers in Economics. Only M.I.T. and Harvard ranked higher than UCSB in environmental economics.
- 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.
- 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.
- The UCSB Libraries have opened up the world of historic sound recordings by mounting thousands of digitized cylinder recordings on an immensely popular new Web site: http://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu.
- Twice this decade, UCSB has been named one of the "hottest" colleges in the nation by the popular Newsweek guide to top colleges.
- The campus has been selected to host the 2010 College Cup, the NCAA men’s soccer championship. In 2006 the men’s soccer team won the NCAA championship.
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