U.S. public university with campuses at Berkeley (main campus), Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, Riverside, San Diego (La Jolla), San Francisco, Santa Barbara, and Santa Cruz.
Established in 1868 in Oakland, it has become one of the largest university systems in the U.S. In the 1930s research at the Berkeley campus produced the first cyclotron , the isolation of the human polio virus, and the discovery of several new chemical elements. The Berkeley campus remains a leader in scientific fields as well as in many other academic areas. The Los Angeles branch (UCLA), founded in 1919, includes schools of law, medicine, and engineering. The San Francisco campus, originally the university's Medical Center (1873), has schools of medicine, nursing, dentistry, and pharmacy. The San Diego campus, founded as a marine station, became part of the university in 1912; it includes the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The Davis and Riverside campuses grew out of agricultural institutes and were both added in 1959. The Santa Barbara campus was granted university status in 1944, those at Santa Cruz and Irvine in 1965. The university operates the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (both nuclear research centres) and the Los Alamos National Laboratory.