Region : Ontario
City : Toronto
Web site : www.utoronto.ca
The University of Toronto (U of T, UToronto, or Toronto) is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada on the grounds that surround Queen's Park. It was founded by royal charter in 1827 as King's College, the first institution of higher learning in the colony of Upper Canada. Originally controlled by the Church of England, the university assumed the present name in 1850 upon becoming a secular institution. As a collegiate university, it comprises twelve colleges, which differ in character and history, each with substantial autonomy on financial and institutional affairs. It has two satellite campuses in Scarborough and Mississauga.
Academically, the University of Toronto is noted for influential movements and curricula in literary criticism and communication theory, known collectively as the Toronto School. The university was the birthplace of insulin and stem cell research, and was the site of the first practical electron microscope, the development of multi-touch technology, the identification of the first black hole Cygnus X-1, and the development of the theory of NP-completeness. By a significant margin, it receives the most annual scientific research funding of any Canadian university. It is one of two members of the Association of American Universities outside the United States, the other being McGill University.
The Varsity Blues are the athletic teams that represent the university in intercollegiate league matches, with long and storied ties to gridiron football and ice hockey. The university's Hart House is an early example of the North American student centre, simultaneously serving cultural, intellectual and recreational interests within its large Gothic-revival complex.
The University of Toronto has educated two Governors General of Canada and four Prime Ministers of Canada, four foreign leaders,fourteen Justices of the Supreme Court, and has been affiliated with ten Nobel laureates.
The Faculty of Arts and Science is the university's main undergraduate faculty, and administers most of the courses in the college system.While the colleges are not entirely responsible for teaching duties, most of them house specialized academic programs and lecture series. Among other subjects, Trinity College is associated with programs in international relations, as are University College with Canadian studies, Victoria College with Renaissance studies, Innis College with film studies and urban studies, New College with gender studies, Woodsworth College with industrial relations and St. Michael's College with Medievalism.The faculty teaches undergraduate commerce in collaboration with the Rotman School of Management. The Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering is the other major direct-entry undergraduate faculty.
The University of Toronto is the birthplace of an influential school of thought on communication theory and literary criticism, known as the Toronto School.Described as "the theory of the primacy of communication in the structuring of human cultures and the structuring of the human mind",the school is rooted in the works of Eric A. Havelock and Harold Innis and the subsequent contributions of Edmund Snow Carpenter, Northrop Frye and Marshall McLuhan. Since 1963, the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology of the Faculty of Information has carried the mandate for teaching and advancing the Toronto School.
Several notable works in arts and humanities are based at the university, including the Dictionary of Canadian Biography since 1959 and the Collected Works of Erasmus since 1969.The Records of Early English Drama collects and edits the surviving documentary evidence of dramatic arts in pre-Puritan England,while the Dictionary of Old English compiles the early vocabulary of the English language from the Anglo-Saxon period.
The Munk School of Global Affairs encompasses the university's various programs and curricula in international affairs and foreign policy. As the Cold War heightened, Toronto's Slavic studies program evolved into an important institution on Soviet politics and economics, financed by the Rockefeller, Ford and Mellon foundations.The Munk School is also home to the G20 Research Group, which conducts independent monitoring and analysis on the Group of Twenty, and the Citizen Lab, which conducts research on Internet censorship as a joint founder of the OpenNet Initiative.The university operates international offices in Berlin, Hong Kong and Siena.
The Dalla Lana School of Public Health is a Faculty of the University of Toronto that began as one of the Schools of Hygiene begun by the Rockefeller Foundation in 1927. The School went through a dramatic renaissance after the 2003 SARS crisis, and it is now Canada's largest public health school, with more than 750 faculty, 800 students, and research and training partnerships with institutions throughout Toronto and the world. With more than $39 million in research funding per year, the School supports discovery in global health, tobacco impacts on health, occupational disease and disability, air pollution, inner city, circumpolar health, and many other pressing issues in population health.
The Faculty of Medicine is affiliated with a network of ten teaching hospitals, providing medical treatment, research and advisory services to patients and clients from Canada and abroad.A core member of the network is University Health Network, itself a specialized federation of Toronto General Hospital, Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, Toronto Western Hospital, and Toronto Rehabilitation Institute.Physicians in the medical institutes have cross-appointments to faculty and supervisory positions in university departments. The Rotman School of Management developed the discipline and methodology of integrative thinking, upon which the school bases its curriculum.Founded in 1887, the Faculty of Law's emphasis on formal teachings of liberal arts and legal theory was then considered unconventional, but gradually helped shift the country's legal education system away from the apprenticeship model that prevailed until the mid-20th century.The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education is the teachers college of the university, affiliated with its two laboratory schools, the Institute of Child Study and the University of Toronto Schools.Autonomous institutes at the university include the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics, the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies and the Fields Institute.
The University Ranking by Academic Performance places the University of Toronto 2nd in the world in research performance.The Times Higher Education World University Rankings of 2016 ranks the University of Toronto at 22nd place globally and 1st in Canada, while the QS World University Rankings of 2016 placed the university at 32nd in the world and 2nd in Canada.In the Academic Ranking of World Universities of 2014, the University of Toronto is placed at 24th in the world and 1st in Canada.It ranked 25th worldwide in the 2012 report compiled by Human Resources & Labor Review on graduate performance,9th worldwide in the 2010 Performance Ranking of Scientific Papers for World Universities,14th in the High Impact Universities ranking,14th in a New York Times employment survey in 2013,and 2nd globally in the University Ranking by Academic Performance of 2014-2015.In 2011, the university received a grade of A- for environmental sustainability from the Sustainable Endowments Institute.The university has placed first among Canada's research universities in the annual ranking by Research Infosource since 2001.In 2011, the University of Toronto was named by Newsweek as one of the top three schools outside of the United States.In 2016, it was also ranked 21st in the world by the U.S. News & World Report?s Best Global Universities Ranking.
The University of Toronto ranked as the nation's top medical-doctoral (category) university in Maclean's magazine for eleven consecutive years between 1994 and 2004.Since 2009, it has joined 22 other national institutions in withholding data from the magazine, citing continued concerns regarding methodology.In 2013, the Faculty of Law was named the top law school in Canada by Maclean's for the seventh consecutive year.
The first practical electron microscope was built by the physics department in 1938.During World War II, the university developed the G-suit, a life-saving garment worn by Allied fighter plane pilots, later adopted for use by astronauts.Development of the infrared chemiluminescence technique improved analyses of energy behaviours in chemical reactions.In 1963, the asteroid 2104 Toronto is discovered in the David Dunlap Observatory in Richmond Hill and is named after the university.In 1972, studies on Cygnus X-1 led to the publication of the first observational evidence proving the existence of black holes.Toronto astronomers have also discovered the Uranian moons of Caliban and Sycorax,the dwarf galaxies of Andromeda I, II and III, and the supernova SN 1987A. A pioneer in computing technology, the university designed and built UTEC, one of the world's first operational computers, and later purchased Ferut, the second commercial computer after UNIVAC I.Multi-touch technology was developed at Toronto, with applications ranging from handheld devices to collaboration walls.The AeroVelo Atlas, which was the first to win the Igor I. Sikorsky Human Powered Helicopter Competition in 2013, was developed by the university's team of students and graduates and was tested in Vaughan.
The University of Toronto is the primary research presence that supports one of the world's largest concentrations of biotechnology firms.More than 5,000 principal investigators reside within 2 kilometres (1.2 mi) from the university grounds in Toronto's Discovery District, conducting $1 billion of medical research annually.MaRS Discovery District is a research park that serves commercial enterprises and the university's technology transfer ventures. In 2008, the university disclosed 159 inventions and had 114 active start-up companies.Its SciNet Consortium operates the most powerful supercomputer in Canada.
Sources : Wikipedia, www.utoronto.ca
