The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

The University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign is the state's flagship institution: a classic land grant university dedicated to its traditional excellence in education, research, and public engagement. It is also driven to innovate in each of these missions. More than 1,800 Urbana-Champaign faculty members lead more than 45,000 undergraduate, graduate and professional students in discovery and learning in 16 colleges and schools and more than 80 research centres and labs.

Undergraduates make up three-quarters of the student population. Nearly 90 per cent of the undergraduate students come from the 102 counties of Illinois, with the rest travelling to Illinois from all 50 states and more than 100 nations. All are highly qualified and choose between 150 undergraduate programs of study. Undergraduate students often travel around the globe through one of the top ten study abroad programs among major research institutions in the United States.

Faculty members are also well connected internationally, collaborating with other leading scholars worldwide and across disciplines. They are world-renowned scholars who have been recognized with such top awards as Nobel Prizes, Pulitzer Prizes, Guggenheim Fellowships, Tony Awards, MacArthur 'genius' awards, and memberships in the nation's elite academies of arts and sciences.

Of twelve Nobel laureates who have served on the faculty, two were honoured for work undertaken at this university. Illinois became only the third American public university and the eleventh institution globally to have two Nobel Prizes (in different fields) awarded to members of its faculty in the same year. Urbana campus alumni are similarly recognized.

Eleven University alumni have won Nobel Prizes. Campus resources include the world's largest public university library, with an average of 1.1 million items circulated and 225,000 reference questions answered each year. Outstanding centres for performance and training in the arts include one of the nation's best-performing arts facilities, the Krannert Center. World-class research facilities in Urbana include the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, Beckman Institute, Institute for Genomic Biology and Siebel Center for Computer Science.

Of course, many people across the nation know Urbana-Champaign as the home of nine men's and ten women's Big Ten sports teams. The campus Division of Intercollegiate Athletics is known for its integrity and emphasis on scholarship among its athletes. Men's basketball and football are high profile sports, but Illinois has also won recent national and conference champions in gymnastics, tennis, and wrestling programs.

The University is located on a 1,470-acre campus in Urbana-Champaign (population: 83,424), 130 miles from Chicago. Served by bus and train; air serves Chicago; air also serves Savoy (four miles).