The University of California, Berkeley (also referred to as Berkeley, UC Berkeley, California or simply Cal)[8] is a public research university located in Berkeley, California. It is the flagship campus of the University of California system, one of three parts in the state’s public higher education plan, which also includes the California State University system and the California Community Colleges System.

UC Berkeley is the most selective – and highest ranked in U.S. News and ARWU [9][10] – public university in the world for undergraduate education.[11][12][13] Aside from its academic prestige, the university is also well known for producing a high number of entrepreneurs.[14][15][16]

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, UC Berkeley is the oldest institution in the UC system and offers approximately 350 undergraduate and graduate degree programs in a wide range of disciplines.[17] The University of California has been charged with providing both “classical” and “practical” education for the state’s people.[18][19] Cal 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, 18 Turing Awards, 45 MacArthur Fellowships,[20] 20 Academy Awards, and 11 Pulitzer Prizes. To date, UC Berkeley scientists have discovered 6 chemical elements of the periodic table (californium, seaborgium, berkelium, einsteinium, fermium, lawrencium). Along with Berkeley Lab, UC Berkeley researchers have discovered 16 chemical elements in total – more than any other university in the world.[21] Berkeley is a founding member of the Association of American Universities and continues to have very high research activity with $730.7 million in research and development expenditures in the fiscal year ending June 30, 2014.[22][23] 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”. Former United States Secretary of Energy and Nobel laureate Steven Chu (PhD 1976), was Director of Berkeley Lab, 2004–2009.