The University of Edinburgh is over 400 years old and is one of the largest in the UK. It is Scotland's premier research University, graded within the top 4 British Universities in the recent National Research Assessment Exercise. It has 3600 academic staff, 13,800 undergraduate and 3,500 postgraduate students, and a research income of £54M pa. It contains four Faculty Groups (Science & Engineering; Medicine & Veterinary Medicine; Law & Social Science; Arts, Divinity & Music) each with a Provost as head.
The Faculty of Science and Engineering is one of the largest Science faculties in the United Kingdom with approximately 4,800 undergraduate students and 1,100 postgraduate students. It consists of multi- and single-department planning units: Geology & Geophysics; Chemistry; Physics (Departments of Physics & Astronomy, and Meteorology); Mathematics & Statistics; Informatics (Departments of Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science, the Centre for Cognitive Science and Human Communication Research Centre); Electronics; Engineering (Departments of Chemical, Civil and Mechanical Engineering); Biological Sciences. The majority of Faculty departments are located at the King's Buildings campus, approximately two miles out of the city centre.