<ol>
<li><p>There are many top professors.</p></li>
<li><p>The Shanghai Jiao Tong rankings says about its methodology that they will do a size-adjusted ranking of universities.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>I used the rankings methodology, which is to simply divide the entire set of each university’s statistics and divide it by the number of faculty.</p>
<p>The result was that Brown came out sixth.</p>
<p>I don’t follow how this shows anything other than Brown’s alumni and professors have, relative to faculty size, a lot of publications and nobel prizes. This probably has significantly more of an effect on the graduate experience than undergraduate one.</p>
<p>unless you were expecting something else.</p>
<p>“1. There are many top professors”</p>
<p>Dude I don’t know where you’re getting your information. As far as I remember, there’s exactly one Nobelist on the faculty at Brown (Leon Cooper) and he’s emeritus and doesn’t teach. According to Wikipedia there are 6 other Nobelists who have had an affiliation with Brown, two of whom went there for undergrad (Craig Mello is one). </p>
<p>If you mean top professors in terms of teaching, you might have a point. But top professors in terms of output in top journals and prizes (Nobel, Wolf, HHMI), I’m not agreeing with you because I really don’t think its true. I realize you’re scaling to size, but I also think that’s a fundamental flaw when looking at these places. If you’re at a place with a lot of high-caliber researchers, you’re more likely to be able to work with a high-caliber researcher and collaborate with a high caliber researcher. The researchers at Brown are good, and overall much better than most places, but they aren’t earth-shattering.</p>
<p>The fact that we have one Nobel laureate (as well as one Fields Laureate), as well as one Nobel Laureate who published his prizeworthy research which was done at Brown (Lars Onsager), and the fact that we have 600 or so professors (500 or so 10 years ago), and the fact that our Med school is only 30 years old and 1/5 the size of Harvards (1/3 the size of Johns Hopkins’), and the fact that other prestigious research schools (excluding Dartmouth), have at least 2,500 professors, (Harvard, Yale, Penn, Columbia, Cornell, Chicago, Berkeley, Duke, Michigan, Oxford, Cambridge, and so on)
(save Stanford, Princeton, Caltech) says something positive about our university’s research, doesn’t it?</p>
<p>By the way, Cooper might be emeritus, but before that, he had kept teaching Phys.10 and some other stuff after he had won the Nobel prize.</p>
<p>Even if there is a fundamental flaw of looking at “per capita performance” rankings of research, it is also true that even in terms of the award-winning faculty members or alumni, Brown doesn’t fare too badly; in fact it still will be in the top 15 in the world for faculty and alumni Nobel prizes, simply because of the small size of its faculty group and student group as well. </p>
<p>Also, our semi-top professors (if you want to call them that way), are also top in their fields: especially in economics, where we have one editor-in-chief, and several board of editors for the Journal of Economic Growth, the 4th most influential economics journal in the world. Someone in our faculty discovered the third photoreceptor in the eye, which is probably bound for the Nobel, and one other discovered the Higgs mechanism, receiving the Sakurai prize. John Donoghue is pretty good. Not to list other professors (like Cooper, who also made the BCM model in neuroscience), who are doing top research at such a small institution.</p>
<p>Leon Cooper has not retired and will be teaching PHYS 10 next spring.</p>
<p>“The fact that we have one Nobel laureate (as well as one Fields Laureate), as well as one Nobel Laureate who published his prizeworthy research which was done at Brown (Lars Onsager)”</p>
<p>Onsager I’ve heard of, and David Mumford spent most of his time at Harvard if I remember right, including his undergrad and graduate school. If you want to use another metric for math prowess, Brown never really does that well on the Putnam (though it saw an upswing in recent years, which I hope continues). </p>
<p>“and the fact that we have 600 or so professors (500 or so 10 years ago), and the fact that our Med school is only 30 years old and 1/5 the size of Harvards (1/3 the size of Johns Hopkins’), and the fact that other prestigious research schools (excluding Dartmouth), have at least 2,500 professors, (Harvard, Yale, Penn, Columbia, Cornell, Chicago, Berkeley, Duke, Michigan, Oxford, Cambridge, and so on), (save Stanford, Princeton, Caltech) says something positive about our university’s research, doesn’t it?”</p>
<p>You could make the argument that Brown is an up-and-comer and I’d have no problem with that. You could also make the argument that there are a few good researchers at Brown, which is unequivocally true. But the fact remains that it still, scientifically, isn’t in the same flight as these institutions, some of which have multiple Nobelist alumni and faculty and several HHMI, Wolf, Sakurai, etc winners. </p>
<p>Furthermore, in my experience, the facilities and equipment available at Brown is subpar and lagging, which could have a lot to do with the size. That’ll change with Ruth pumping more money into the sciences though. Its also not regarded as a top-flight research institute by the community itself (speaking to my experience at interviews and whatnot), which does mean something. </p>
<p>On top of that, Brown isn’t a place that most people consider going for graduate school in the sciences; since students tend to vote with their feet, so to speak, that probably says just as much about the program as anything else. If Brown’s star continues to rise, and I hope it does, then this’ll change. Furthermore, there are few people who did their undergrad or graduate work at Brown who have gone on to win super-awesome prizes, as far as I can tell. Brown UGs aren’t exactly well-represented on the faculties of top research institutes compared to colleges of similar or higher rank, and I’m willing to bet that the grad students don’t fare nearly as well. </p>
<p>“By the way, Cooper might be emeritus, but before that, he had kept teaching Phys.10 and some other stuff after he had won the Nobel prize.”</p>
<p>I wish he did when I took it.</p>
<p>“Even if there is a fundamental flaw of looking at “per capita performance” rankings of research, it is also true that even in terms of the award-winning faculty members or alumni, Brown doesn’t fare too badly; in fact it still will be in the top 15 in the world for faculty and alumni Nobel prizes, simply because of the small size of its faculty group and student group as well.”</p>
<p>So if you adjust per capita, its in the top 15 in the world? Sounds about the same as its USNWR ranking to me. </p>
<p>“Also, our semi-top professors (if you want to call them that way), are also top in their fields: especially in economics, where we have one editor-in-chief, and several board of editors for the Journal of Economic Growth, the 4th most influential economics journal in the world.”</p>
<p>Why is Brown’s Econ PhD program ranked 19th then? All the Econ majors I knew went to Stanford and MIT for grad school for a reason, methinks.</p>
<p>“Someone in our faculty discovered the third photoreceptor in the eye, which is probably bound for the Nobel,”</p>
<p>I hope he gets it, it’ll only do more for Brown.</p>
<p>“and one other discovered the Higgs mechanism, receiving the Sakurai prize.”</p>
<p>Which of the like seven guys who did that is at Brown? My money’s on Kibble, if only because his name is fun to say.</p>
<p>“John Donoghue is pretty good. Not to list other professors (like Cooper, who also made the BCM model in neuroscience), who are doing top research at such a small institution.”</p>
<p>Nifty. There’s good research everywhere (the Cre-Lox system was invented by some dude in Utah), but my point is that at Brown there just isn’t a lot of it. The cases you’ve listed are exceptions.</p>
<p>I just want to make the point that Brown isn’t a research powerhouse, and its not a typical place to go for a science-focused undergrad or for graduate school in the sciences. This is exactly because Brown, quantity-wise, just doesn’t have as many earth-shattering researchers as other institutions. And its not a place where many earth-shattering researchers are trained (which is why every single bio class clings to Craig Mello like a savior). If you’re a high school student applying to college and looking at doing research at Brown, you’ll be plagued by this problem and the problem of sub-par research facilities and equipment. Maybe in 10-20 years Brown will be a top grant-getter from the NIH, HHMI, and NSF, but it just isn’t right now and the research at Brown reflects that (among other metrics; I just picked grant money at random).</p>
<p>Geoforce: first of all, our economics graduate program is ranked at 17th, same as Cornell. Also, our rankings in growth economics is ‘‘5th’’. And since I study ecnomics, I can tell you that almost all of the 30 economics professors at Brown are growth (or relevantly, population or labor economists) while in most other schools, most economics professors are macro or microeconomists. The latter two areas garner the majority of the Nobel prize in economics (which is a fake Nobel prize anyway, widely disputed for its bias). So far, only two Nobelists were growth economists; Kuznets and Solow.</p>
<p>Also, I understand your concern about “quantity” being a major factor in becoming a research powerhouse, but</p>
<p>Brown barely has a graduate school at all.</p>
<p>I will give you a quick comparison. A school of Columbia’s size, which is a tiny little bit larger than small-to-middle sized research institutions, generally keeps more than 20,000 graduate students, including those in the professional schools. Oh, not to mention Columbia’s 3,600 full-time professors.</p>
<p>Harvard has 10,000+ faculty and staff on its medical school. Brown has 2,000.</p>
<p>So of course, we can’t compete in terms of high quality research quantity (that’s pretty long, but the accurate point); that would be ridiculous.</p>
<p>My point is that while we can’t get credit for the “quantity” from the words “high quality research quantity”, at least we are already close to the average “quality” or at least close-to-competitive with our fellow Ivy League institutions or large well-reputed research schools.</p>
<p>Therefore, the general point of my post, is that, while I agree that Brown isn’t a powerhouse as much as we would want it to be in terms of research, it still is an elite school in terms of RESEARCH, NOT JUST IN ADMISSIONS. Just look at the citations rankings of each university ranking, or the profiles of many of our research faculty. Just how “elite” it is is disputable, but in comparison to the major research powerhouses, we don’t really fall too low off the mark. At least according to the ARWU indicators when those indicators are properly controlled for size ratios. The Times ranking gave Brown citation score a 99 in 2007.</p>
<p>There were six people who discovered the Higgs Mechanism, and Gerald S.Guralnik was the Brown professor who did so. He and two others (with Hagen and Kibble) wrote a co-paper, while there were two other papers, one done individually by Higgs. The Brout-Englert paper was published first, and the GHK paper last, but the difference is only 2 months. Anecdotal and record evidence says that GHK were the first to discover the Higgs Mechanism in 1963, but the others were quick to publish their research in August 1964. GHK published in Novembet 1964, but they had the most seamless and sound theory, while the two others could not solve the conflict between their proposed models with the idea of the Goldstone Boson.</p>
<p>Lastly, on your depreciation of our graduate students, I would list some superb past graduate students from our school in the sciences,</p>
<p>Stanley Falkow (Lasker Award)
Mark F.Bear (MIT Brain Lab Chief)
John Guttag (MIT Computer Sci. Chief)</p>
<p>We should be proud that in a school that had a medical school for only 30 years, we produced people like Falkow, Mello, Bear, and Aaron T.Beck (B.Sc. '50), the most influential psychologist in the latter half of the 20th century.</p>
<p>Some of our graduate and Ph.D students have included:
The former US Solicitor General
President of Mt.Holyoke College
Inventor of the transistor
etc…</p>
<p>Whether or not the research is world-class, I’m still impressed by the generosity of Brown professors. My junior year I began emailing professors in my field of interest to get an idea of the undergraduate programs and research opportunities at their schools. Although many professors wrote back and offered to meet with me, the one at Brown was very receptive, inviting me back several times to observe her research, visit her lab group, and sit in on classes. Given my proximity to Brown, I was able to come down several times my senior year, and after I got in, I asked whether I could intern for her over the summer. Thanks to her kindness, I’ve ended up working in her laband as I gained experience, several other labs in the departmentfor the past year.</p>
<p>I doubt this situation is unique to Brown, but the point remains that undergraduates are able to work directly with professors, even in mildly obscure areas such as my own. I’m not just assisting a post-doc: I meet with my professor frequently. Moreover, working with post-docs and grad students has also been valuable; as a result, I’ve learned a little more about academia as it applies to younger members in the field (i.e. myself in five or ten years).</p>