@BiffBrown : Exactly why I am impressed. My guess is that the collaborations with Georgia Tech and CDC affiliation in biomedically related research (say vaccines) helps. In addition, drug discovery is huge.
Also, Georgia Tech doing well is not a surprise…sorry. It just isn’t. It may not have a huge lay prestige, but it is pretty renowned among those remotely knowledgeable about STEM and engineering (especially industry and government) and has seriously improved over time on top of how awesome it already was. Being innovative, especially in STEM is the who institution’s mission. For example, consider the scale of its rendition of an undergraduate BME program (it was one of the very first to fully infuse PBL into a BME or life sciences curriculum. Georgia Tech doesn’t really play about education or research. It stretches its dollars as far as it can go). Also, it looks like “innovative” here is more so quantified by start-up culture among whatever faculty and institutes. It seems like a good thing, and probably is mostly beneficial or benign, but it could also spell many conflicts of interest and things of that nature. American universities seem to do well, and I suspect that part of this is because of how important medical centers are to American Universities. Engineering + large medical centers seem to correlate with a desire to do a start up or patent things. It is very interesting for sure. However, this may go into quantity versus quality. Like we generally know which schools tend to generate start-ups or products that have the highest impact and these rankings may not fully reflect that. Like the Oxbridge thing you brought up. One could imagine that even if they are slower paced on average than some of the schools that rank above them, when they do have breakthroughs resulting in a patent are start-up, they may tend to have more impact than some of those schools. Given that science is typically involved, quality and impact are super important.