University of Colorado

The University of Colorado was founded in 1876 in the town of Boulder.

The new university—now known as the University of Colorado Boulder (UCB)—was one of three institutions of higher learning founded by the territorial legislature in 1876, just months before Colorado achieved statehood. The other two schools were the Colorado Agricultural College in Ft. Collins and the Colorado School of Mines in Golden.

While the University of Colorado Boulder (UCB) remains the flagship campus of the overall University of Colorado system, today there are two other main campuses, in Colorado Springs and in Denver.

In addition, there is the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, located in the Denver suburb of Aurora. The Medical Campus comprises a medical school, a nursing school, a dental school, a School of Public Health, and the Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, as well as several important teaching hospitals.

Today, UCB consists of nine colleges and schools, which altogether offer more than 150 academic programs. Among its highly respected, specialized scientific institutes, one may mention the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics and the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics (now known as JILA). Presently, the student body numbers more than 35,000 individuals.

UCB boasts of twelve Nobel laureates who have been associated with it over the years, to wit:

• Physicists, Eric A. Cornell, John L. Hall, Herbert Kroemer, Norman Ramsey, Carl Weiman & David Wineland
• Chemists, Sidney Altman & Thomas Cech
• Biochemist, Stanley Cohen and the molecular biologist Craig Mello for physiology or medicine
• Bangladeshi economist Muhammad Yunus and the President of Liberia for peace

Other prominent UCB-linked individuals include the following:

• Young adult author, Gary Paulsen
• Screenwriter, Dalton Trumbo
• TV animator and producer, Trey Parker
• Actors, Robert Redford & Christopher Meloni
• Trombonist and big band leader, Glenn Miller
• Applied mathematician, Mark Jay Ablowitz
• Physicists, Heather Lewandowski & Jun Ye
• Inventor of the laser, Theodore Maiman
• Test pilot and astronaut, Scott Carpenter
• Chemist, Clayton Heathcock
• Cell biologist, Kenneth R. Miller
• Human Genome Project leader, David Haussler
• Computer scientist and Turing Award winner, Alan Kay
• Linguist and cognitive scientist, Laura Michaelis
• Psychiatrist, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
• Former US Supreme Court Justice, Byron White
• Present US Senator, Cory Gardner