UC San Diego has 9th highest number of top scientists in the world and could soon pass MIT

UC San Diego has the ninth-largest collection of highly cited researchers in the world and is close to passing UC Berkeley and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says an annual assessment of global brain power by Clarivate, a British science data company.

The new list says the University of California San Diego has 56 highly cited scientists, and that an additional 32 elite scholars work at local institutions such as Scripps Research, the Salk Institute, the La Jolla Institute for Immunology, Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute, San Diego State University and Rady Children’s Hospital.

Clarivate’s rankings are considered to be the “who’s who” of science, covering fields ranging from chemistry and physics to clinical medicine and engineering.

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The company says its list identifies researchers “who demonstrated significant influence in their chosen field or fields through the publication of multiple highly cited papers during the last decade.”

Their names are “drawn from the publications that rank in the top 1 percent by citations for field and publication year in the Web of Science citation index.”

About 6,600 scientists worldwide made this year’s list. The United States led the way with 2,622 researchers, including Ardem Patapoutian of Scripps Research, who won this year’s Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine. Sixteen other Scripps Research scientists were chosen, including Dennis Burton and Ian Wilson, who played major roles over the past 18 months in determining the nature of COVID-19.

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Another Scripps scientist, Jin-Quan Yu, made the list and is considered to be Nobel Prize candidate based on his efforts to make chemical reactions more efficient — something that’s essential to drug development.

The UC San Diego cluster includes Rob Knight, one of the most prominent figures in the study of the microbiome — the collection of good and bad microbes that live on people’s skin and in their mouths and guts.

Knight also drew attention over the past year for creating a network of sensors that searched for the presence of COVID-19 in the wastewater of campus buildings. The program turned out to be highly efficient, helping the school to identify people who had become infected so that they could be quarantined.

UC San Diego is 160 years younger than MIT. But it only has eight fewer people on the list, suggesting that it could catch up or pass the famous institute in the next few years.

Here is the list of the 10 institutions with the highest number of highly-cited researchers.

1. Harvard, 214
2. Chinese Academy of Sciences, China, 194
3. Stanford, 122
4. National Institutes of Health, 93
5. Max Planck Society, Germany, 70
6. MIT, 64
7. UC Berkeley , 62
8. Tsinghua University, China, 58
9. UC San Diego, 56
10. University of Oxford, 51