A recent assessment by the National Research Council has placed Penn State's Department of Chemistry among the top chemistry departments in the nation. The most conservative analysis of all the metrics used by the National Research Council ranks Penn State's Department of Chemistry among the top dozen departments in the country. The report's ranking methods gauge many productivity factors, such as the number of research publications and research grants per faculty member as well as the number of times other scientific studies cite a faculty member's publications. The National Research Council's regression-based measure of quality ranks Penn State's chemistry number nine overall and third among public institutions throughout the United States.
Barbara Garrison, the Shapiro Professor of Chemistry and Head of the Department of Chemistry at Penn State, said "The improvement of almost 10 places in rank since 1995 attests to the excellence of the department and further establishes us as one of the outstanding chemistry departments in the country."
The Data Based Assessment of Graduate Programs, produced by the National Research Council for a consortium of universities, used a broad range of measurements to rank the performance of thousands of graduate programs across hundreds of U.S. universities. Additional details about the Data Based Assessment of Graduate Programs report and its methodology are available at http://www.nap.edu/rdp/.
For more information, contact Garrison at bjg@psu.edu or 814-863-2103, or contact Barbara Kennedy at science@psu.edu or 814-863-4682.