UCSB Geography Information

Geography Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The department currently has 28 faculty, 10 administrative staff, 4 research staff, 7 professional researchers, 22 specialists/postdocs, nearly 100 graduate students and over 200 undergraduates. The department also houses 2 research centers: The Climate Hazards Center and spatial@ucsb. UCSB Geography is internationally recognized as one of the best Departments of Geography in the world, and we have been ranked among the top doctoral programs in the U.S. by a variety of indices for the past two decades. In 1995, The National Research Council ranked us number 4 in the nation, based upon reputation by peer review. In its 2010 Assessment of Research-Doctorate Programs, they used a new methodology designed to show the full complexity of the data and the difficulty of giving a unique ranking, and each program and department was given a range of possible rankings, depending on how much weight was given to the different components used in the ranking. Accordingly, our Graduate Division rated us number 2 in the nation, a ranking based on a “sort by S-weight 5th, then 95th percentile rank,” while Cornell University concluded that UCSB Geography is number 1, using a ranking “sorted by R Mid.” In the same vein, phds.org ranked us the number 1 “large, prestigious program” among Departments of Geography in the USA” in 2009, and the Chronicle of Higher Education ranked us number two in the nation on its “Top Research Universities Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index” in 2008.