History

The largest university in the Chicago area, University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) has 25,000 students, 15 colleges and annual research expenditures exceeding $307 million. UIC was formed in 1982 by the consolidation of two University of Illinois campuses: the Medical Center campus, which dates back to the 19th century, and the comprehensive Chicago Circle campus which replaced, in 1965, the two-year undergraduate Navy Pier campus that had opened in 1946 to educate returning veterans. Click to Enlarge

Budget

$1.3 billion

Faculty

UIC’s faculty have been recognized with many prestigious awards including the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship, Fulbright Distinguished Professorship, Guggenheim Foundation grant, National Science Foundation’s CAREER grant, Jonas Salk Lifetime Achievement Award, Society of Women Engineers’ Achievement Award, and the United States Capitol Historical Society’s Freedom Award.

Students Click to Enlarge

UIC students reflect the global character of Chicago; more than a third of UIC students speak English as a second language. UIC’s student body approximately 65% undergraduate and 35% graduate and professional – is recognized as one of the nation’s most diverse, a factor that the university considers among its greatest strengths.

UIC students win major national competitive awards, including a Rhodes Scholarship, Gates-Cambridge Scholarships, Goldwater Scholarships, Fulbright Fellowships,and Harry S. Truman Scholarships, among others.

Things You Should Know About UIC

  • UIC’s hallmark is its Great Cities Commitment through which UIC faculty, staff and students engage in hundreds of programs with community, corporate, government and civic partners to improve the quality of life in Chicago and other metropolitan areas around the world.

  • Playing a critical role in Illinois healthcare, UIC operates the state’s major public medical center and serves as the principal educator of Illinois’ physicians, dentists, pharmacists, nurses and other healthcare professionals.

  • UIC ranks among the top 50 out of more than 650 national universities in federal research funding for the second year in a row.

  • UIC is a member of the three Regional Centers of Excellence designated in September 2003 by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services as part of the federal government’s response to 9/11. The RCEs research new diagnostics, therapeutics and vaccines for potential bioterrorist agents and emerging infectious diseases.

  • UIC is home to the world’s most powerful magnet for imaging the human body. The 9.4-Tesla magnet—which has a magnetic field approximately 100,000 times stronger than Earth’s—is used in a human scanning machine to study individual molecules as they support life.

  • Two faculty members in the College of Architecture and the Arts have won MacArthur Fellowships, also known as “genius grants.”

  • UIC’s Electronic Visualization Laboratory has created a virtual reality tool called PARIS®—the Personal Augmented Reality Immersive System—that allows collaborating researchers anywhere to jointly move and feel a virtual object in real time.

  • UIC’s School of Public Health’s CeaseFire initiative, working with city officials, police and community groups, has reduced gun-related deaths an average of 44 percent in the high-risk neighborhoods where the program has been implemented.

  • Part of UIC’s west side campus was once a ballpark called the West Side Grounds, home to the Chicago Cubs when they won the World Series in 1908.

  • UIC has an extensive public art collection of more than 5,000 paintings, sculptures, murals and prints, including historic statues from the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 and various works created by WPA artists.