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Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Type	Public University
Established	6 June 1968
Budget	€313 million (2018)
Rector	Margarita Arboix
Administrative staff	3,660
Students	43,175
Address	Campus UAB Bellaterra, 08193, Cerdanyola del Vallès , Cerdanyola del Vallès , Catalonia, Spain
Campus	Urban
Affiliations	Vives Network, European University Association (EUA), CRUE, Venice International University.
Website	www.uab.cat
data from 2011

The UAB Columns, monument of the university

The Autonomous University of Barcelona also known as UAB (Catalan: Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona; IPA: [uniβəɾsiˈtat əwˈtɔnumə ðə βəɾsəˈlonə], Spanish: Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona) is a public university mostly located in Cerdanyola del Vallès, near the city of Barcelona in Catalonia, Spain.

As of 2012^[update], the university consists of 57 departments in the experimental, life, social and human sciences, spread among 13 faculties/schools. All these centers together award a total of 85 qualifications in the form of first degrees, diplomas, and engineering degrees. Moreover, almost 80 doctoral programs, and more than 80 other postgraduate programs are offered. UAB has more than 40,000 students and more than 3,600 academic and research staff. The UAB is a pioneering institution in terms of fostering research. There are many research institutes in the campus, as well as other research centers, technical support services and service-providing laboratories, and the ALBA (synchrotron) located in the Barcelona Synchrotron Park is very close to the UAB.
The UAB is considered to be the best University in Spain by the 2012 QS World University Rankings,^[1] which ranked the university 176th overall in the world. Its subject rankings were: 144th in Life Sciences & Biomedicine, 92nd^{[clarification needed]} in Arts & Humanities, 106th in Natural Sciences, 95th in Social Sciences and 203rd in Engineering & IT.

Location

Most UAB academic activity is done on the Cerdanyola campus. Several centres exist in Manresa, Sabadell, Terrassa, Sant Cugat del Vallès and Barcelona.

The UAB campus is about 20 km away from the centre of Barcelona. It is accessible by air (flights to Barcelona, Girona, or Reus), by train (Ferrocarrils de la Generalitat, Renfe), by coach (SARBUS), or by car (AP-7 and C-58 motorways).

History

The Autonomous University of Barcelona was officially created by legislative decree on June 6, 1968. Previously, during the Second Spanish Republic, there had been plans for constituting a second university in Barcelona, but the Civil War and the following years of poverty under the early dictatorship did not allow these plans to become a reality until that year.

On July 27, a disposition to the decree was added, starting the creation of the Faculty of Letters, the Faculty of Medicine, the Faculty of Science, and the Faculty of Economical Sciences. Around ten weeks later, on October 6, the first course of the Faculty of Letters was inaugurated at Sant Cugat del Vallès Monastery. During the same month, the Faculty of Medicine was created at the Hospital de Sant Pau in Barcelona.

In 1969, an agreement was signed for the acquisition of the land where the university campus is currently located. During that year, the Faculty of Sciences and the Faculty of Economical Sciences started running. During the following three years, several faculties and professional schools were created, and the construction works on the campus land took place. At the end of this period, most existing faculties and schools are settled in the campus.

At the end of the dictatorship in 1976, the university introduced a plan to create a model of a democratic, independent university, described in a document known as Bellaterra Manifesto, which included a declaration of principles. Two years later, after the approval of the Catalan Statute, the University Council agreed to recourse to the Generalitat de Catalunya.

During the period between 1985 and 1992, the university underwent several faculty reforms and the creation of several new faculties. In 1993, the University Ville was inaugurated as a student residence integrated inside the campus complex.

Residence

Vila Universitària is the residential complex of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, located on its campus, which has 812 apartments with a total accommodation capacity for 2193 persons. The apartments at Vila Universitària enjoy a very privileged setting: they are located between the campus and the forest and have beautiful views, good train and bus connections and are about 45 minutes from the centre of Barcelona which is Plaza Catalunya.^[2]

Computer Vision Center

Computer Vision Center is a computer vision research center based at UAB.^[3][4] It was established in 1994 by the Generalitat de Catalunya and the UAB.^{[citation needed]} In 2002, the commenced publication of Electronic Letters on Computer Vision and Image Analysis.^{[citation needed]} It participated in the Pascal Challenge in 2009.^[5][6]

Port d'Informació Científica (PIC)

The Port d'Informació Científica (Catalan for Scientific Information Port) is a research center and institution at the campus of the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona (UAB). Founded in 2003, its activity has been closely related to the development and exploitation of computing resources for the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG). A collaboration of IFAE (High Energy Physics Institute of the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona) and CIEMAT (Centro de Investigaciones Energéticas Medioambientales and Tecnológicas), it is supported by regional (Catalan) and national (Spanish) research governing authorities.

The main scientific project PIC is associated to, in terms of utilization of computing resources, is the deployment, operations and maintenance of the Spanish Tier 1 site for the WLCG, supporting the ATLAS, CMS and LHCb experiments of the LHC at CERN. PIC researchers and computing experts hence contribute to the development of Grid Computing technologies, as required by the computing needs of these experiments. Other projects in which PIC researchers are involved include computing support for Astrophysics and Cosmology experiments (such as MAGIC, PAU and DES) and computing techniques for medical imaging.

Notable alumni

• 
  D. Sam Abrams (born 1952), poet, translator and critic.


• 
  Matilde Asensi (born 1962), journalist and writer


• 
  Maria Badia i Cutchet (born 1947), politician


• 
  Mònica Bernabé (born 1972), journalist


• 
  Javier Calvo (1973), writer


• 
  Carlos Cordon-Cardo (born 1957), bio-medical scientist


• 
  Jaume Casals (born 1958), professor of philosophy


• 
  Carlota Escutia Dotti, geologist


• 
  Cristina Fallarás (born 1968), journalist and writer


• 
  Francesc Homs Molist (born 1969), politician


• 
  Irene Rigau (born 1951), politician


• 
  Ramon Espadaler Parcerisas (born 1963), politician


• 
  Marisol Prado (born 1968), physician, psychiatrist and academic


• 
  Martí de Riquer i Morera (1914–2013), linguist


• 
  Simona Škrabec (born 1968), critic, essayist and translator


• 
  Oriol Junqueras (born 1969), historian and politician


• 
  Xavier Sala-i-Martin (born 1962), economist

See also

• Vives Network


• List of universities in Spain


• Barcelona Graduate School of Economics

References

External links

Scholia has an organization profile for Autonomous University of Barcelona.

• Official site

Coordinates: 41°30′01″N 2°06′28″E / 41.50028°N 2.10778°E / 41.50028; 2.10778