The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has been ranked sixth in the world in pharmacy and pharmaceutical sciences by the ShanghaiRanking Consultancy, an independent organization that has been the official publisher of the Academic Ranking of World Universities since 2009.
In the United States, the School ranks below only Harvard University, the University of California, San Francisco and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Also in the top 10 are Yale and the University of Washington.
The ARWU ranks universities across the globe based on six indicators: The number of alumni and staff winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals, highly cited research papers, papers published in Nature and Science, papers indexed in major citation indices and the per capita academic performance of the institution.
The highest-scoring institution, in this case Harvard, receives a 100 and the scores of all subsequent universities are calculated as a percentage of the top score.
This ranking is different from the number one ranking the School holds from U.S. News as Best Pharmacy Program in the U.S. That rating is based on a score from 1-5 calculated from answers in a survey of academics at peer institutions.
“Global rankings such as AWRU confirm that the creativity and innovation we see across campus puts us among the best institutions around the globe,” said Ronald Strauss, executive vice provost and chief international officer for UNC-Chapel Hill. The university as a whole ranked 33rd in the world and 23rd in the U.S.