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One of only 62 members of the American Association of Universities, UC Santa Barbara is renowned as a research university with an outstanding faculty. The College of Letters and Science, the largest center of teaching, learning and research on the campus, has a distinguished faculty of nearly 700 scientists, scholars, and artists, many of whom have been recognized nationally and internationally for their excellence. An advantageous ratio of faculty to graduate students offers these students possibilities to work closely with faculty mentors.

Four of UCSB’s five Nobel laureates are members of the College’s faculty. Other high honors received by College faculty include the National Humanities Medal, awarded to Professor Luis Leal in 1997, and the National Medal of Science, awarded to professor Walter Kohn (also a Nobel laureate) in 1988. Over 20 current and emeriti professors in the College’s highly-ranked science departments are elected members of the National Academy of Sciences, as are many of UCSB’s 43 fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Three members of our faculty – Alison Anders, Professor of Film and Media Studies,  David Gross, Director of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, and Eva Silverstein, Professor of Physics and member of the Kavli Institute – are recipients of “genius” grants from the MacArthur Foundation.

Our junior faculty are consistently recognized for their excellence. In the sciences, campus-wide, 24 investigators have active Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) awards—the National Science Foundation’s important grant to professors considered most likely to become academic leaders. The campus ranks fourteenth in the country in number of faculty who receive CAREER awards and prestigious Sloan research fellowships— an especially notable achievement, considering that UCSB has fewer assistant professors than the other highly rated schools.

The College’s faculty ranks include nearly 60 Guggenheim fellows. According to the Guggenheim Foundation, these highly prestigious fellowships are intended for men and women who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts. Our Guggenheim fellows belong to a wide array of academic departments, including art and art history, music, language and literature, history, religious studies, anthropology, political science, sociology, chemistry, physics, the biological sciences and psychology.

Over the last 10 years, some 25 faculty members from a range of disciplines have been named Fulbright Scholars, selected for their academic merit and leadership potential, to lecture and perform research in countries around the world. Our faculty also host visiting Fulbright Scholars who conduct their own research at UC Santa Barbara.

One of the the major sources of funding for faculty research grants is the National Science Foundation (UCSB is among the top 25 NSF-funded institutions), including for work in linguistics, communication, anthropology, and media arts and technology, in addition to the mathematical, life and physical sciences. Humanities faculty have received fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as the MacArthur Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies. UCSB is an invited member of the ACLS Academic Research Consortium, along with 31 other research universities, in recognition of the number of faculty who have received ACLS fellowships.

Our faculty also receive support from private philanthropists, particularly for endowed chairs, which allow for the recruitment of the highest-caliber faculty in specialized areas. There are nearly 40 endowed chairs in the College of Letters and Science, including most recently the Duncan and Suzanne Mellichamp Academic Initiative Professorships (four distinguished professorships - two in the humanities and two in the social sciences – clustered around the study of global civil society), and the Ahlers Chair in experimental physics, funded by Professor Guenter Ahlers of the Physics Department.