UC Berkeley College of Chemistry

The UC Berkeley College of Chemistry is one of 14 schools and colleges at the University of California, Berkeley. It houses the departments of chemistry and chemical and biomolecular engineering and occupies six buildings flanking central plaza. US News and World Report has ranked its chemistry and chemical engineering programs first and second in the U.S., respectively. Its faculty and graduates have won numerous awards, including the Wolf Prize, the National Medal of Science, the National Medal of Technology, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, as well as thirteen Nobel Prizes. As of 2010-2011, it has 771 undergraduates, 481 graduates, and 303 postdoctoral fellows.

The Department of Chemistry is one of the largest and most productive in the world, graduating about 80 doctoral students per year while maintaining the world's highest citation-per-faculty score. It hosts 6 of the top 100 chemists worldwide by citation impact for 2000–2010, tied with MIT for the most of any instutition. Scientists affiliated with the department and the nearby Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory are responsible for the discovery of sixteen elements, including Berkelium, named after the city, and Seaborgium, named after Nobel laureate and former department chair Glenn Seaborg.

First established in 1872, the college awarded its first Ph.D. in 1885 to John Stillman, who later founded the Chemistry Department at Stanford University. A Division of Chemical Engineering was established in 1946, becoming a department in 1957. The Department of Chemical Engineering changed its name to Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering in 2010 to reflect the research focus of its faculty in the 21st century.