University of Manchester

The University of Manchester (informally Manchester University or Manchester) is a public research university located in Manchester, United Kingdom. It was formed in October 2004 by the merger of the Victoria University of Manchester (established in 1851) and the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (established in 1824). It is a member of the Russell Group of research-intensive British universities, the N8 Group and is recognised as a British "red brick" university since 1880; the year its federal Victoria University predecessor gained its royal charter.

The main site of the university is in central Manchester and is home to most of its academic activities. The main residential campus is located in Fallowfield, around two miles south of the main site. There are other university buildings located throughout the city and the wider region, including One Central Park in Moston. As of 2012, the university has around 39,000 students and 10,400 staff, making it the largest single-site university in the United Kingdom. The University of Manchester had an income of £808.6 million in 2010–11, of which £196.2 million was from research grants and contracts.

In the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise, Manchester came third in terms of research power and eighth for grade point average quality when including specialist institutions. More students try to gain entry to the University of Manchester than to any other university in the country, with more than 60,000 applications for undergraduate courses alone. According to the 2012 Highfliers Report, Manchester is the most targeted university by the Top 100 Graduate Employers. In the 2012 Academic Ranking of World Universities, Manchester is ranked 40th in the world and 5th in the UK. It is ranked 32nd in the world, 10th in Europe and 8th in the UK in the 2012 QS World University Rankings.

The University of Manchester and its antecedent institutions have 25 Nobel Laureates among their past and present students and staff, the third-highest number of any single university in the United Kingdom (after Cambridge and Oxford). Four Nobel laureates are currently among its staff – Sir Andre Geim (Physics, 2010), Sir Kostya Novoselov (Physics, 2010), Sir John Sulston (Physiology and Medicine, 2002) and Joseph Stiglitz (Economics, 2001).

Origins
The University of Manchester can trace its roots back to the formation of the Mechanics' Institute (later to become UMIST) in 1824, and its history is closely linked to Manchester's emergence as the world's first industrial city. The English chemist John Dalton, together with Manchester businessmen and industrialists, established the Mechanics' Institute to ensure that workers could learn the basic principles of science. Similarly, John Owens, a Manchester textile merchant, left a bequest of £96,942 in 1846 (around £5.6 million in 2005 prices) to found a college to educate men on non-sectarian lines. His trustees established Owens College in 1851. It was initially housed in a building on the corner of Quay Street and Byrom Street which had been the home of the philanthropist Richard Cobden, and subsequently was to house Manchester County Court. In 1873 it moved to new premises at Oxford Road, Chorlton-on-Medlock and from 1880 it was a constituent college of the federal Victoria University. The university was established and granted a Royal Charter in 1880 becoming England's first civic university; it was renamed the Victoria University of Manchester in 1903 and absorbed Owens College the following year.

By 1905, the two institutions were large and active forces in the area, and the Municipal College of Technology, forerunner of UMIST, formed the Faculty of Technology of the Victoria University of Manchester while continuing as a technical college in parallel with offering advanced courses of study in the faculty. Although UMIST achieved independent university status in 1955, the two universities continued to work together.

Before the merger, Victoria University of Manchester and UMIST counted 23 Nobel Prize winners amongst their former staff and students. Manchester has traditionally been strong in the sciences, it is where the nuclear nature of the atom was discovered by Rutherford, and the world's first stored-program computer was built at the university. Famous scientists associated with the university include physicists Osborne Reynolds, Niels Bohr, Ernest Rutherford, James Chadwick, Arthur Schuster, Hans Geiger, Ernest Marsden and Balfour Stewart. However, the university has also contributed in other fields, such as by the work of mathematicians Paul Erdős, Horace Lamb and Alan Turing; author Anthony Burgess; philosophers Samuel Alexander, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Alasdair MacIntyre; the Pritzker Prize and RIBA Stirling Prize winning architect Norman Foster and composer Peter Maxwell Davies all attended, or worked in, Manchester.

The Victoria University of Manchester and the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology agreed to merge into a single institution in March 2003.

2004 to present
The University of Manchester was officially launched on 1 October 2004 when the Queen handed over its Royal Charter. Following the merger, the university was named Sunday Times University of the Year in 2006 after winning the inaugural Times Higher Education Supplement University of the Year prize in 2005.

The founding President and Vice-Chancellor of the new university was Alan Gilbert, former Vice-Chancellor of the University of Melbourne, who retired at the end of the 2009-2010 academic year. Gilbert's successor was Professor Dame Nancy Rothwell, who had held a chair in physiology at the university since 1994. One of the university's aims stated in the Manchester 2015 Agenda is to be one of the top 25 universities in the world. This follows Alan Gilbert's aim for the university to 'establish it by 2015 among the 25 strongest research universities in the world on commonly accepted criteria of research excellence and performance'. As of 2011, four Nobel laureates are currently among its staff: Andre Geim, Konstantin Novoselov, Sir John Sulston and Joseph E. Stiglitz.

The EPSRC announced in Feb 2012 the formation of a National Institute for Graphene Research. The University of Manchester is the "single supplier invited to submit a proposal for funding the new £45m institute, £38m of which will be provided by the government" - (EPSRC & Technology Strategy Board)

In August 2012, it was announced that the university's Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences had been chosen to be the 'hub' location for a new BP International Centre for Advanced Materials. The centre will be aimed at advancing fundamental understanding and use of materials across a variety of oil and gas industrial applications and will be modelled on a hub and spoke structure, with the hub located at Manchester, and the spokes based at the University of Cambridge, Imperial College London, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Campus
The main site of the university contains most of its facilities and is often referred to as campus. Despite this, Manchester is not a campus university as the concept is commonly understood. It is centrally located and its buildings are integrated into the fabric of Manchester, with non-university buildings and major roads between.

Campus occupies an area shaped roughly like a boot: the foot of which is aligned roughly south-west to north-east and is joined to the broader southern part of the boot by an area of overlap between former UMIST and former VUM buildings; it comprises two parts: These names are not officially recognised by the university, but are commonly used, including in parts of its website; another usage is Sackville Street Campus and Oxford Road Campus. They roughly correspond to the campuses of the old UMIST and Victoria University respectively, although there was already some overlap before the merger.
 * North campus, centred on Sackville Street
 * South campus, centred on Oxford Road.

Fallowfield Campus is the main residential campus of the university. It is located in Fallowfield, approximately 2 miles (3 km) south of the main site.

There are a number of other university buildings located throughout the city and the wider region, such as One Central Park (in the northern suburb of Moston) and Jodrell Bank Observatory (in the nearby county of Cheshire). The former is a collaboration between Manchester University and other partners in the region which offers office space to accommodate new start-up firms as well as venues for conferences and workshops.

Major projects
Following the merger, the university embarked on a £600 million programme of capital investment, to deliver eight new buildings and 15 major refurbishment projects by 2010, partly financed by a sale of unused assets. These include:
 * £60 m Flagship University Place building (new)
 * £56 m Alan Turing Building houses Mathematics, replaced Mathematics Tower. Home to the Photon Sciences Institute and the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics (new)
 * £50 m Life Sciences Research Building (A. V. Hill Building) (new)
 * £38 m Manchester Interdisciplinary Biocentre (MIB) (new)
 * £33 m Life Sciences and Medical and Human Sciences Building (Michael Smith Building) (new)
 * £31 m Humanities Building - now officially called the "Arthur Lewis Building" (new)
 * £20 m Wolfson Molecular Imaging Centre (WMIC) (new)
 * £18 m Re-location of School of Pharmacy
 * £17 m John Rylands Library, Deansgate (extension & refurbishment of existing building)
 * £13 m Chemistry Building
 * £10 m Functional Biology Building

The Old Quadrangle
The buildings around the Old Quadrangle date from the time of Owens College, and were designed in a Gothic style by Alfred Waterhouse and his son Paul Waterhouse. The first to be built was the John Owens Building (1873), formerly the Main Building. The others were added over the next thirty years. The Rear Quadrangle is older than the Old Quadrangle. Today, the museum continues to occupy part of one side, including the tower, and the grand setting of the Whitworth Hall is used for the conferment of degrees. Part of the old Christie Library (1898) now houses Christie's Bistro, and the remainder of the buildings house administrative departments.

Contact Theatre


The Contact Theatre largely stages modern live performance and participatory work for younger audiences. The present fortress-style building on Devas Street was completed in 1999 but incorporates parts of its 1960s predecessor. It features a unique energy-efficient system, using its high towers to naturally ventilate the building without the use of air conditioning. The colourful and curvaceous interior houses three performance spaces, a lounge bar and Hot Air, a reactive public artwork in the foyer.

Jodrell Bank Observatory
The Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics is a combination of the astronomical academic staff, situated in Manchester, and the Jodrell Bank Observatory on rural land near Goostrey, about ten miles (16 km) west of Macclesfield away from the lights of Greater Manchester. The observatory has the third largest fully movable radio telescope in the world, the Lovell Telescope, constructed in the 1950s. It has played an important role in the research of quasars, pulsars and gravitational lenses, and has played a role in confirming Einstein's theory of General Relativity.

Chancellors Hotel and Conference Centre
Formerly named The Firs, the original house was built in 1850 for Sir Joseph Whitworth by Edward Walters, who also designed Manchester’s Free Trade Hall and Strangeways Prison. Whitworth used The Firs mainly as a social, political and business base, entertaining radicals of the age such as John Bright, Richard Cobden, William Forster and T.H. Huxley at the time of the Reform Bill of 1867. Whitworth, credited with raising the art of machine-tool building to a previously unknown level, supported the Mechanics Institute – the birthplace of UMIST - and helped found the Manchester School of Design. Whilst living in the house, Whitworth used land to the rear (now the site of the University's botanical glasshouses) for testing his "Whitworth rifle". In 1882, The Firs was leased to C.P. Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian. After Scott's death the house became the property of Owens College, and was the Vice-Chancellor's residence until 1991.

The old house now forms the western wing of Chancellors Hotel & Conference Centre at the university. The newer eastern wing houses the circular Flowers Theatre, six individual conference rooms and the majority of the 75 hotel bedrooms.

Faculties and schools
The University of Manchester is divided into four faculties, each sub-divided into schools:
 * Faculty of Medical and Human Sciences consisting of the Schools of Medicine; Dentistry; Nursing, Midwifery and Social Work; Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences; and Psychological Sciences.
 * Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences consisting of the Schools of Chemical Engineering and Analytical Science; Petroleum Engineering; Chemistry; Computer Science; Earth, Atmospheric and Environmental Science; Physics and Astronomy; Electrical & Electronic Engineering; Materials; Mathematics; and Mechanical, Aerospace and Civil Engineering.
 * Faculty of Humanities includes the School of Arts, Histories and Cultures (incorporating Archaeology; Art History & Visual Studies; Classics and Ancient History; Drama; English and American Studies; History; Museology; Music; and Religions and Theology). The other Schools are Combined Studies; Education; Environment and Development; Architecture; Languages, Linguistics and Cultures; Law; Social Sciences and the Manchester Business School.
 * Faculty of Life Sciences unusually consisting of a single school.

Finances
In the financial year ending 31 July 2011, the University of Manchester had a total income of £808.58 million (2009/10 – £787.9 million) and total expenditure of £754.51 million (2009/10 – £764.55 million). Key sources of income included £247.28 million from tuition fees and education contracts (2009/10 – £227.75 million), £203.22 million from funding body grants (2009/10 – £209.02 million), £196.24 million from research grants and contracts (2009/10 – £194.6 million) and £14.84 million from endowment and investment income (2009/10 – £11.38 million). During the 2010/11 financial year the University of Manchester had a capital expenditure of £57.42 million (2009/10 – £37.95 million).

At year end the University of Manchester had endowments of £158.7 million (2009/10 – £144.37 million) and total net assets of £731.66 million (2009/10 – £677.12 million).

Academics
The University of Manchester has the largest number of full-time students in the UK, unless the University of London's colleges are counted as a single university. It teaches more academic subjects than any other British university.

Well-known figures among the university's current academic staff include computer scientist Steve Furber, economist Richard Nelson, novelist Colm Tóibín and biochemist Sir John Sulston, Nobel laureate of 2002.

Research
The University of Manchester is a major centre for research and a member of the Russell Group of leading British research universities. In the first national assessment of higher education research since the university’s founding, the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise, the university was ranked third in terms of research power (after Cambridge and Oxford) and sixth for grade point average quality among multi-faculty institutions (eighth when including specialist institutions) Manchester has the fifth largest research income of any British university (after Oxford, Imperial, UCL and Cambridge). (these five universities have been informally referred to as the 'golden diamond' of research-intensive UK institutions). Manchester has a strong record in terms of securing funding from the three main UK research councils, EPSRC, MRC and BBSRC, being ranked fifth, 7th and first respectively. In addition, the university is one of the richest in the UK in terms of income and interest from endowments: a recent estimate placed it third, surpassed only by Oxford and Cambridge. Despite recent severe cuts in higher education Manchester remains at second place behind Oxford nationally in terms of total recurrent grants allocated by the HEFCE.

Historically, Manchester has been linked with high scientific achievement: the university and its constituent former institutions combined had 25 Nobel Laureates among their students and staff, the third largest number of any single university in the United Kingdom (after Oxford and Cambridge) and the ninth largest of any university in Europe. Furthermore, according to an academic poll two of the top ten discoveries by university academics and researchers were made at the university (namely the first working computer and the contraceptive pill). The university currently employs four Nobel Prize winners amongst its staff, more than any other in the UK.

Medicine
The origins of the Manchester Medical School are in the School of Anatomy established at Manchester Royal Infirmary by Joseph Jordan in 1814. Medical education has continued there since then. The college was formally established in 1874 and is one of the largest in the country, with over 400 medical students being trained in each of the clinical years and over 350 students in the pre-clinical/phase 1 years. Approximately 100 students who have completed pre-clinical training at the Bute Medical School (University of St Andrews) join the third year of the undergraduate medical programme each year.

The university's Faculty of Medical and Human Sciences has links with a large number of NHS hospitals in the North West of England and maintains presences in its four base hospitals: Manchester Royal Infirmary (located at the southern end of the main university campus on Oxford Road), Wythenshawe Hospital, Hope Hospital and the Royal Preston Hospital. All are used for clinical medical training for doctors and nurses.

In 1883, a dedicated department of pharmacy was established at the university and, in 1904, Manchester became the first British university to offer an Honours degree in the subject. The School of Pharmacy benefits from the university's links with Manchester Royal Infirmary and Wythenshawe and Hope hospitals. All the undergraduate pharmacy students gain hospital experience through these links and are the only pharmacy students in the UK to have an extensive course completed in secondary care. The university is a founding partner of the Manchester Academic Health Science Centre, established to focus high-end healthcare research in Greater Manchester.

Future development plans include collaboration plans with Manchester City Football Club and the National Health Service (NHS) to establish a world-leading research facility on sports science and treatment in Sportcity.

Dentistry
Manchester Dental School was rated as the best dental school in the UK by Times Higher Education in 2010 and 2011. It is one of the best funded dental schools in the UK, due to its great emphasis on research and the modernising of learning. The university has obtained multi-million pound backing to maintain its high standard of dental education. The number of applicants far exceeds the number of places available; in 2011 there were 1000 applicants for 75places. Graduates have enjoyed some of the best employment prospects of UK dental school graduates. The school's enquiry-based learning approach has proved popular with students and other UK dental schools are adopting this teaching style.

The University Dental Hospital of Manchester is part of Central Manchester University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. It was established in 1884 in association with the School of Medicine at Owens College. It was then at Grosvenor Street, Chorlton on Medlock and in 1892 moved to another house, in Devonshire Street. Fund raising was slow in response to a public appeal and only in 1908 was the hospital able to occupy a new building on Oxford Road next to the Manchester Museum. It was designed in the Edwardian Baroque style by Charles Heathcote & Sons. In 1905 the university established a degree and a diploma in dental surgery (first awarded in 1909 and 1908 respectively). A contribution from Godfrey Ermen towards the cost of building the hospital is recorded on a stone tablet near the entrance.

John Rylands University Library


The university's library, the John Rylands University Library, is the largest non-legal deposit library in the UK and the third-largest academic library after those of Oxford and Cambridge. It has the largest collection of electronic resources of any library in the UK.

The oldest part, the John Rylands Library, founded in memory of John Rylands by his wife Enriqueta Augustina Rylands as an independent institution, is situated in a Victorian Gothic building on Deansgate, in the city centre. It houses an important collection of historic books and other printed materials, manuscripts, including archives and papyri. The papyri are in ancient languages and include the oldest extant New Testament document, Rylands Library Papyrus P52, commonly known as the St John Fragment. In April 2007 the Deansgate site reopened to readers and the public after major improvements and renovations, including the construction of the pitched roof originally intended and a new wing.

Manchester Museum
The Manchester Museum holds nearly 4.25 million items sourced from many parts of the world. The collections include butterflies and carvings from India, birds and bark-cloth from the Pacific, live frogs and ancient pottery from America, fossils and native art from Australia, mammals and ancient Egyptian craftsmanship from Africa, plants, coins and minerals from Europe, art from past civilisations of the Mediterranean, and beetles, armour and archery from Asia. In November 2004, the museum acquired a cast of a fossilised Tyrannosaurus rex called "Stan".

The museum's first collections were assembled in 1821 by the Manchester Society of Natural History, and subsequently expanded by the addition of the collections of Manchester Geological Society. Due to the society's financial difficulties and on the advice of evolutionary biologist Thomas Huxley, Owens College accepted responsibility for the collections in 1867. The college commissioned Alfred Waterhouse, architect of London’s Natural History Museum, to design a museum on a site in Oxford Road to house the collections for the benefit of students and the public. The Manchester Museum was opened to the public in 1888.

Whitworth Art Gallery
The Whitworth Art Gallery houses collections of internationally famous British watercolours, textiles and wallpapers, modern and historic prints, drawings, paintings and sculpture. It contains 31,000 items in its collection. A programme of temporary exhibitions runs throughout the year and the Mezzanine Court displays sculpture. The gallery was founded by Robert Darbishire with a donation from Sir Joseph Whitworth in 1889, as The Whitworth Institute and Park. In 1959 the gallery became part of the Victoria University of Manchester. In October 1995 the Mezzanine Court in the centre of the building was opened. It was designed to display sculptures and won a RIBA regional award.

Rankings and reputation
According to The Sunday Times, "Manchester has a formidable reputation spanning most disciplines, but most notably in the life sciences, engineering, humanities, economics, sociology and the social sciences".

The 2009 THE - QS World University Rankings found Manchester overall 26th in the world. It was also ranked by the same report 5th internationally by employer reviews (along with MIT and Stanford and ahead of Yale and Cornell) by receiving a maximum 100% rating which the university has retained since 2008. The separate 2011 QS World University Rankings found that Manchester had slipped to 29th overall in the world (in 2010 Times Higher Education World University Rankings and QS World University Rankings parted ways to produce separate rankings).

The Academic Ranking of World Universities 2011 published by the Institute of Higher Education of Shanghai Jiao Tong University ranked Manchester 5th in the UK, 6th in Europe and 38th in the world. If US universities are excluded then the ARWU places Manchester as 10th in the world for 2011. According to the ARWU rankings for 2009 the university is 9th in Europe for natural sciences and 4th in engineering. Similarly the HEEACT 2009 rankings for scientific performance place Manchester 5th in Europe for engineering, 8th for natural sciences and 3rd for social sciences. And finally THES ranks Manchester 6th in Europe for technology, 10th for life sciences and 7th for social sciences. More recently a survey by the Times Higher Education Supplement has shown that Manchester is placed 6th in Europe in the area of Psychology & Psychiatry. According to a further ranking by SCImago Research Group Manchester is ranked 5th in Europe amongst higher education institutions in terms of sheer research output for 2011. In terms of research impact a further ranking places Manchester 6th in Europe. Manchester is also one of only seven universities in Europe which are rated Excellent in all seven main academic departments (Biology, Chemistry, Mathematics, Physics, Psychology, Economics and Political Science) by the 2010 Centre for Higher Education's Development's Excellence Rankings. The Manchester Business School is currently ranked 29th worldwide (4th nationally) by the Financial Times. The latest THES rankings place Manchester 11th in Europe with respect to research volume, income and reputation and 7th in the UK.

According to the High Fliers Research Limited's survey, University of Manchester students are being targeted by more top recruiters for graduate vacancies than any other UK university students for three consecutive years (2007–2009). Furthermore the university has been ranked joint 20th in the world for 2009 according to the Professional Ranking of World Universities. Its main compilation criterion is the number of Chief Executive Officers (or number 1 executive equivalent) which are among the "500 leading worldwide companies" as measured by revenue who studied in each university. The ranking places the University only behind Oxford nationally. Manchester is ranked 5th among British universities according to a popularity ranking which is based on the degree of traffic that a university's website attracts. Also a further report places Manchester within the top 20 universities outside the US. Manchester was also given a prestigious award for Excellence and Innovation in the Arts by the Times Higher Education Awards 2010.

At a recent ranking undertaken by the Guardian, Manchester is placed 5th in the UK in international reputation behind the usual four: Oxbridge, UCL and Imperial. Furthermore, according to the latest QS World University Rankings, Manchester is ranked 4th in Europe strictly in terms of both academic and employer reputation. However, while as a rule world rankings (such as the ARWU, THES and HEEACT ) typically place the university within the top 10 in Europe, national studies are less complimentary; The Times 'Good University Guide 2011’ ranked Manchester 30th out of 113 Universities in the UK, ‘The Complete University Guide 2012' in association with The Independent placed it at 29th out of 116 universities whilst ‘The Guardian University Guide 2012’ ranked Manchester at 41st out of 119 universities in the UK. This apparent paradox is mainly a reflection of the different ranking methodologies employed by each listing: global rankings focus on research and international prestige, whereas national rankings are largely based on teaching and the student experience.

Manchester University Press
Manchester University Press is the university's academic publishing house. It publishes academic monographs, textbooks and journals, most of which are works from authors based elsewhere in the international academic community, and is the third-largest university press in England after Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press.

Students' Union
The University of Manchester Students' Union (UMSU) is the representative body of students at the university and the UK's largest students' union. It was formed out of the merger between UMIST Students' Association (USA) and University of Manchester Union (UMU) when the parent organisations UMIST and the Victoria University of Manchester merged on 1 October 2004.

Unlike many other students' unions in the UK, it does not have a president, but is run by a 14 member executive team (eight full-time, six voluntary) who share joint responsibility.

Sport
The University of Manchester operates sports clubs via the Athletics Union while student societies are operated by the Students' Union.

The university has more than 80 health and fitness classes while over 3,000 students are members of the 44 various Athletic Union clubs. The sports societies vary widely in their level and scope. Many more popular sports operate several university teams and departmental teams which compete in leagues against other teams within the university. Teams include: lacrosse, korfball, dodgeball, hockey, rugby league, rugby union, football, basketball, netball and cricket. The Manchester Aquatics Centre, the swimming pool used for the Manchester Commonwealth Games is on the campus.

The university competes annually in 28 different sports against Leeds and Liverpool universities in the Christie Cup, which Manchester has won for seven consecutive years. The university has achieved success in the BUCS (British University & College Sports) competitions, with its mens water polo 1st team winning the national championships (2009, 2010, 2011) under the tutelage of coach Andy Howard. It was positioned in eighth place in the overall BUCS rankings for 2009/10 The Christie Cup is an inter-university competition between Liverpool, Leeds and Manchester in numerous sports since 1886. After the Oxford and Cambridge rivalry, the Christie's Championships is the oldest Inter–University competition on the sporting calendar: the cup was a benefaction of Richard Copley Christie.

Every year elite sportsmen and sportswomen are selected for membership of the XXI Club, a society formed in 1932 to promote sporting excellence at the university. Most members have gained a Full Maroon for representing the university and many have excelled at a British Universities or National level.

University Challenge
Since merging as the University of Manchester, the university has consistently reached the latter stages on the BBC2 quiz programme University Challenge. The team has progressed to the semi-finals every year of the competition since 2005.

In 2006, Manchester beat Trinity Hall, Cambridge, to record the university's first triumph in the competition. The year after, the university finished in second place after losing out to the University of Warwick in the final. In 2009, the team battled hard in the final against Corpus Christi College, Oxford. At the gong, the score was 275 - 190 to Corpus Christi College after an extraordinary performance from Gail Trimble. However, the title was eventually given to the University of Manchester after it was discovered that Corpus Christi team member Sam Kay had graduated eight months before the final was broadcast, so that the team was disqualified.

Manchester reached the semi-finals in the 2010 competition before being beaten by Emmanuel College, Cambridge. The university did not enter the 2011 series for an unknown reason. However, Manchester did enter a year later and won University Challenge 2012.

Student housing
Before they merged, the two former universities had for some time been sharing their residential facilities.

Main campus
Whitworth Park Halls of Residence is owned by the University of Manchester and houses 1,085 students. It is notable for its triangular shaped accommodation blocks which gave rise to the nickname of "Toblerones", after the chocolate bar. Their designer took inspiration from a hill created from excavated soil which had been left in 1962 from an archaeological dig led by John Gater. A consequence of the triangular design was a reduced cost for the construction company. A deal struck between the university and Manchester City Council meant the council would pay for the roofs of all student residential buildings in the area, Allan Pluen's team is believed to have saved thousands on the final cost of the halls. They were built in the mid 1970s.
 * Whitworth Park Halls of Residence

The site of the halls was previously occupied by many small streets whose names have been preserved in the names of the halls. Grove House is an older building that has been used by the university for many different purposes over the last sixty years. Its first occupants in 1951 were the Appointments Board and the Manchester University Press. The shops in Thorncliffe Place were part of the same plan and include banks and a convenience store. Notable people associated with the halls include Friedrich Engels, whose residence is commemorated by a blue plaque on Aberdeen House; the physicist Brian Cox; and Irene Khan, Secretary General of Amnesty International.

The former UMIST Campus has five halls of residence near to Sackville Street building (Weston, Lambert, Fairfield, Chandos, and Wright Robinson), and several other halls within a 5-15 minute walk, such as the Grosvenor group of halls.
 * Sackville Street

Moberly Tower has been demolished. Other residences include Vaughn House, once the home of the clergy serving the Church of the Holy Name, and George Kenyon Hall at University Place; Crawford House and Devonshire House adjacent to the Manchester Business School and Victoria Hall in Higher Cambridge Street.
 * Other accommodation

Fallowfield and Victoria Park Campuses
The Fallowfield Campus, 2 miles (3.2 km) south of the Oxford Road Campus is the largest of the university's residential campuses. The Owens Park group of halls with a landmark tower is at its centre, while Oak House is another hall of residence. Woolton Hall is next to Oak House. Allen Hall is a traditional hall near Ashburne Hall (Sheavyn House being annexed to Ashburne). Richmond Park is a recent addition to the campus.

Victoria Park Campus, comprises several halls of residence. Among these are St Anselm Hall with Canterbury Court and Pankhurst Court, Dalton-Ellis Hall, Hulme Hall (including Burkhardt House), St Gabriel's Hall and Opal Gardens Hall. St Anselm Hall is the only all-male hall in the United Kingdom.

Notable people
Many notable people have worked or studied at one or both of the two former institutions that now form the University of Manchester, including 25 Nobel prize laureates. Some of the best-known include John Dalton (founder of modern atomic theory), Ludwig Wittgenstein (considered one of the most significant philosophers of the 20th century, who studied for a doctorate in engineering), George E. Davis (founder of the discipline of Chemical Engineering), Bernard Lovell (a pioneer of radio astronomy), Alan Turing (one of the founders of computer science and artificial intelligence), Tom Kilburn and Frederic Calland Williams (who developed Small-Scale Experimental Machine (SSEM) or "Baby", the world's first stored-program computer at Victoria University of Manchester in 1948), Irene Khan (former Secretary General of Amnesty International), the author Anthony Burgess and Robert Bolt (two times Academy Award winner and three times Golden Globe winner for writing the screenplay for Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago).

A number of politicians are associated with the university, including the current Presidents of the Republic of Ireland, Belize, Iceland and Trinidad and Tobago, and several ministers in the United Kingdom, Malaysia, Canada and Singapore and Chaim Weizmann, a chemist and the first President of Israel. A number of well-known actors studied at the university, including Benedict Cumberbatch.

Nobel prize winners
Overall, there have been 25 Nobel Prizes awarded to staff and students past and present, with some of the most important discoveries of the modern age being made in Manchester.

Chemistry
 * Ernest Rutherford (awarded Nobel prize in 1908), for his investigations into the disintegration of the elements and the chemistry of radioactive substances.
 * Arthur Harden (awarded Nobel prize in 1929), for investigations on the fermentation of sugar and fermentative enzymes.
 * Walter Haworth (awarded Nobel prize in 1937), for his investigations on carbohydrates and vitamin C.
 * George de Hevesy (awarded Nobel prize in 1943), for his work on the use of isotopes as tracers in the study of chemical processes.
 * Robert Robinson (awarded Nobel prize in 1947), for his investigations on plant products of biological importance, especially the alkaloids.
 * Alexander Todd (awarded Nobel prize in 1957), for his work on nucleotides and nucleotide co-enzymes.
 * Melvin Calvin (awarded Nobel prize in 1961), for his research on the carbon dioxide assimilation in plants.
 * John Charles Polanyi (awarded Nobel prize in 1986), for his contributions concerning the dynamics of chemical elementary processes.
 * Michael Smith (awarded Nobel prize in 1993), for his fundamental contributions to the establishment of oligonucleotide-based, site-directed mutagenesis and its development for protein studies.

Physics
 * Joseph John (J. J.) Thomson (awarded Nobel prize in 1906), in recognition of his theoretical and experimental investigations on the conduction of electricity by gases.
 * William Lawrence Bragg (awarded Nobel prize in 1915), for his services in the analysis of crystal structure by means of X-rays.
 * Niels Bohr (awarded Nobel prize in 1922), for his fundamental contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum mechanics.
 * Charles Thomson Rees (C. T. R.) Wilson (awarded Nobel prize in 1927), for his method of making the paths of electrically charged particles visible by condensation of vapour.
 * James Chadwick (awarded Nobel prize in 1935), for the discovery of the neutron.
 * Patrick M. Blackett (awarded Nobel prize in 1948), for developing cloud chamber and confirming/discovering positron.
 * Sir John Douglas Cockcroft (awarded Nobel prize in 1951), for his pioneer work on the splitting of atomic nuclei by artificially accelerated atomic particles and also for his contribution to modern nuclear power.
 * Hans Bethe (awarded Nobel prize in 1967), for his contributions to the theory of nuclear reactions, especially his discoveries concerning the energy production in stars.
 * Nevill Francis Mott (awarded Nobel prize in 1977), for his fundamental theoretical investigations of the electronic structure of magnetic and disordered systems.
 * Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov (awarded Nobel prize in 2010), for groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene.

Physiology and Medicine Economics
 * Archibald Vivian Hill (awarded Nobel prize in 1922), for his discovery relating to the production of heat in muscle. One of the founders of the diverse disciplines of biophysics and operations research.
 * Sir John Sulston (awarded Nobel prize in 2002), for his discoveries concerning 'genetic regulation of organ development and programmed cell death'. In 2007, Sulston was announced as Chair of the newly founded Institute for Science, Ethics and Innovation (iSEI) at the University of Manchester.
 * John Hicks (awarded Nobel prize in 1972), for his pioneering contributions to general economic equilibrium theory and welfare theory.
 * Sir Arthur Lewis (awarded Nobel prize in 1979), for his pioneering research into economic development research with particular consideration of the problems of developing countries.
 * Joseph E. Stiglitz (awarded Nobel prize in 2001), for his analyses of markets with asymmetric information. Currently, Professor Joseph E. Stiglitz heads the Brooks World Poverty Institute (BWPI) at the University of Manchester.