Traditions and Student Activities at The University of Southern California - Faculty and Research

Faculty and Research

USC employs approximately 3,249 full-time faculty, 1,486 part-time faculty, and about 10,744 staff members. 350 postdoctoral fellows are supported along with over 800 medical residents. Among the USC faculty, 12 have been elected to the National Academy of Science, 35 to the National Academy of Engineering, 13 to the Institute of Medicine, 21 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 75 to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 6 to the American Philosophical Society, and 9 to the National Academy of Public Administration. 29 USC faculty are listed as among the "Highly Cited" in the Institute for Scientific Information database. George Olah won the 1994 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and directs the Loker Hydrocarbon Research Institute. Leonard Adleman won the Turing Award in 2003.

In fiscal year 2007 USC expended $415.2 million on research, and major funding came from federal agencies: the Department of Health and Human Services granted $182.4 million, Department of Defense $45.7 million, and National Science Foundation $41.8 million. Total foundation and association sponsorship totaled $43.1 million, corporate research $30.6 million, and local government funding totaled $28.1 million.

The university has two National Science Foundation–funded Engineering Research Centers: the Integrated Media Systems Center and the Center for Biomimetic Microelectronic Systems. The Department of Homeland Security selected USC as its first Homeland Security Center of Excellence. Since 1991, USC has been the headquarters of the NSF and USGS funded Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC). The University of Southern California is a founding and charter member of CENIC, the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California, the nonprofit organization, which provides extremely high-performance Internet-based networking to California's K-20 research and education community. USC researcher Jonathan Postel was an editor of communications-protocol for the fledgling internet, also known as ARPANET.

Notable USC faculty include or have included the following: Leonard Adleman, Richard Bellman, Aimee Bender, Barry Boehm, Warren Bennis, Todd Boyd, T.C. Boyle, Leo Buscaglia, Drew Casper, Manuel Castells, Erwin Chemerinsky, Thomas Crow, António Damásio, Francis De Erdely, Percival Everett, Murray Gell-Mann, Seymour Ginsburg, G. Thomas Goodnight, Jane Goodall, Solomon Golomb, Susan Estrich, Janet Fitch, Tomlinson Holman, Henry Jenkins, Thomas H. Jordan, Pierre Koenig, Neil Leach, Leonard Maltin, Daniel L. McFadden, George Olah, Paul Orfalea, George V. Chilingar, Simon Ramo, Irving Reed, Michael Waterman, Frank Gehry, Arieh Warshel, Lloyd Welch, Jonathan Taplin and Diane Winston.