Region : Ontario
City : Hamilton
Web site : www.mcmaster.ca
McMaster University (commonly referred to as McMaster or Mac) is a public research university located in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. The main campus is located on 121 hectares (300 acres) of land near the residential neighbourhoods of Ainslie Wood and Westdale, adjacent to Hamilton's Royal Botanical Gardens. The university operates six academic faculties: the DeGroote School of Business, Engineering, Health Sciences, Humanities, Social Science, and Science. It is a member of the U15, a group of research-intensive universities in Canada. The university bears the name of Honourable William McMaster, a prominent Canadian Senator and banker who bequeathed C$900,000 to the founding of the university. McMaster University was incorporated under the terms of an act of the Legislative Assembly of Ontario in 1887, merging the Toronto Baptist College with Woodstock College. It opened in Toronto in 1890. Inadequate facilities and the gift of land in Hamilton prompted the institution to relocate in 1930. McMaster was controlled by the Baptist Convention of Ontario and Quebec until it became a privately chartered, publicly funded non-denominational institution in 1957.
The university is co-educational, and has over 25,000 undergraduate and over 4,000 post-graduate students. Alumni and former students of the university can be found all across Canada and in 140 countries around the world. Notable alumni include government officials, academics, business leaders, one Rhodes Scholar, and two Nobel laureates. The university ranked 4th among Canadian universities and 94th in the world according to the 2015-2016 Times Higher Education World University Rankings, 4th among Canadian universities and 83rd in the world according to the 2016 Academic Ranking of World Universities, and 6th among Canadian universities and 149th in the world according to the 2014 QS World University Rankings. The McMaster athletic teams are known as the Marauders, and are members of the Canadian Interuniversity Sport.
McMaster is a publicly funded research university, and a member of the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada. McMaster functions on a semester system, operating year-round on academic semesters, fall/winter and spring/summer. In the 2014-2015 academic year, the university had an enrollment of 30,117, students: 24,569 undergraduate students, 4,348 graduate students.
Students may apply for financial aid such as the Ontario Student Assistance Program and Canada Student Loans and Grants through the federal and provincial governments. The financial aid provided may come in the form of loans, grants, bursaries, scholarships, fellowships, debt reduction, interest relief, and work programs. In 2012-2013, McMaster students received $86.1 million in Canada-Ontario Integrated Student Loans and $14.9 million in grants, approximately $101.1 million in total.
The McMaster Model is the university's policy for a student-centred, problem-based, interdisciplinary approach to learning, a policy which has been adopted by several other universities around the world. During the 1960s the McMaster University Medical School pioneered problem-based learning (PBL) tutorials that have since been adopted by other programs and faculties within the university. PBL is now used in medicine, occupational therapy, physical therapy, nursing, midwifery, and other allied fields. Most medical schools in Canada and more than 80 percent of medical schools in the United States employ PBL in their curriculum, and many international universities do the same.
In 1991, McMaster's School of Medicine adopted progress testing, developing the personal progress index (PPI), a system based on progress testing invented concurrently by the University of Missouri-Kansas City's medical school and the Maastricht University. The PPI is used as an objective method for assessing acquisition and retention of knowledge for students in the medical program. The PPI is administered at regular intervals to all students in the program, regardless of their level of training, and plots students' scores as they move through the program. Students typically score 20 percent on their first examination, and increase by five to seven percent with each successive examination. Students can monitor the changes in their scores and receive formative feedback based on a standardized score relative to the class mean. Due to the overwhelming success and research supporting the use of the PPI as an evaluation tool, it is now used in Canada, US, Europe, and Australia.
McMaster University has consistently been ranked one of Canada's top universities. In the 2016 Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) rankings, the university ranked 83rd in the world and fourth-highest in Canada. The 2013-2014 Times Higher Education World University Rankings placed McMaster 92nd in the world, and fourth in Canada. The 2014 QS World University Rankings ranked the university 113th in the world and sixth in Canada. In U.S. News & World Report 2017 global university rankings, the university placed 129st, and fourth in Canada. Newsweek had also ranked McMaster as the 15th top university outside of the United States, and the fourth best university in Canada. In terms of national rankings, Maclean's ranked McMaster 5th in their 2015 overall reputation university rankings. McMaster was ranked in spite of having opted out—along with several other universities in Canada—of participating in Maclean's graduate survey since 2006.
McMaster's Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine has also gained notability. In the 2014–2015 Times Higher Education rankings of clinical, pre-clinical, and health universities, McMaster's medical school ranked 25th in the world and third in Canada. The 2015 QS World University Rankings had ranked the medical program at McMaster 33rd in the world, and fourth in Canada. In the ARWU 2014 rankings for the field of clinical medicine and pharmacy, the university had placed 45th in the world and third in Canada. In U.S. News & World Report 2014 rankings for clinical medicine, the university placed 45th in the world, and fourth in Canada. According to a 2013 Maclean's survey with first-year medical students who obtained a Canadian undergraduate degree, 10.5 percent of these students attended McMaster for their undergraduate education, the most out of any undergraduate institution in the country.
McMaster was also ranked in a number of ARWU rankings based on academic fields. The university was ranked 41st in the ARWU 2013 in the field of social sciences, the second-highest in the country. In the U.S. News & World Report 2014 rankings for social sciences and public health, the university placed 67th in the world, and fourth in Canada. on In the same 2013 ARWU rankings, the university had ranked 101–150th in the field of natural science and mathematics. In an employability survey published by the New York Times in October 2011, when CEOs and chairmans were asked to select the top universities which they recruited from, McMaster placed 61st in the world, and fourth in Canada. Another global employability survey by Times Higher Education was conducted in 2015. In the 2015 Times Global Employability University Ranking, McMaster was placed 86th in the world, and fifth in Canada.
In Research Infosource's Decade in Review, McMaster was designated as the top Canadian performer in university research income growth from 1999 to 2009 in the medical doctoral category and as the second-top performer in research intensity growth for the same period. With a total sponsored research income of $325.156 million, McMaster has the sixth largest sponsored research income in the country. With an average research income of C$239.4 per full-time faculty member, McMaster is also the second most research intensive full-service university in the country. In 2004 McMaster earned the designation of research university of the year based on its ability to attract and capitalize on its research income. Its research activities exceed those of universities twice its size. The federal government is the largest source of funding, providing 54 percent of McMaster's research budget, primarily through grants. Corporations contribute around 13 percent of the overall research budget.
McMaster has received accolades for its research strengths, particularly in the field of health sciences. For five years in a row, McMaster has ranked second in for biomedical and health care research revenues by the Association of Faculties of Medicine of Canada. In 2008–2009, Faculty investigators were overseeing $133 million a year in research, much of that research conducted by scientists and physicians who teach in the medical school. For its 2011 rankings, HEEACT ranked McMaster 35th in the world and third on a national scale for scientific papers in clinical medicine. The Faculty of Health Sciences operates several research institutes, including the Farncombe Family Digestive Health Research Institute, the DeGroote Institute for Infectious Disease Research, and the Stem Cell and Cancer Research Institute. A McMaster research group led by David Sackett and later Gordon Guyatt had been largely credited for largely establishing the methodologies used in evidence-based medicine. Guyatt had also been credited for coining the term evidence-based medicine in 1990. In November 2010, researchers at the Stem Cell and Cancer Research Institute turned clumps of human skin into blood cells, which may help alleviate the shortage of blood donors. A portion of Albert Einstein's brain is preserved and held for medical research at the McMaster brain bank. Researchers there have identified differences in his brain that may relate to his genius for spatial and mathematical thinking.
The Brockhouse Institute for Material Research (BIMR) is located at McMaster. Created in 1960 by Howard Petch, the institute was named after McMaster alumnus Bertram Brockhouse. The BIMR is an interdisciplinary research organization with the mandate to develop, support, and co-ordinate all materials research related activities at McMaster. Its membership of 123 faculty members is drawn from 13 departments in the Faculties of Science, Engineering, and Health Sciences, as well as several Canadian and international universities. Facilities of the BIMR include the Canadian Centre for Electron Microscopy, Centre for Crystal Growth, McMaster Analytical Xray Facility, Electronic and Magnetic Characterization Facility, and the Photonics Research Laboratories. The Canadian Centre for Electron Microscopy is home to the world's most advanced microscope. The Titan 80–300 cubed microscope has a magnification of 14 million and is used for material, medical, and nanotechnology research.
The university also operates the McMaster Nuclear Reactor, which has been used for nuclear science and engineering research since 1959. The strength of nuclear science at McMaster was augmented in 1968 under the presidency of Dr. H.G. Thode by the construction of a 10MV Model FN Tandem particle accelerator. The 3MV Model KN single-ended accelerator was added the same year. The academic direction of the laboratory fell to the Physics Department in the early days, as it was primarily a nuclear structure laboratory. During the next 28 years, the nuclear research effort was extensive, with hundreds of graduate students trained and many publications generated. The reactor at McMaster produces 25 percent of the world's supply of iodine-125, an isotope used in nuclear medicine to treat prostate cancer. The production of molybdenum-99 at the National Research Universal Reactor (NRU) has also been occasionally moved to the university's reactor, during the 1970 and 2009 shutdown of the NRU. McMaster University's SLOWPOKE-2 non-power reactor operating licence is valid until June 30, 2014. The SLOWPOKE reactor is used for research and education, commercial applications such as neutron radiography, and medical radioisotope production; Iodine-125 is used in cancer therapy.
Sources : Wikipedia, www.mcmaster.ca
