Undergraduate study - 2025 entry
Edinburgh: Extraordinary futures await.

Learn from the best

As a student at Edinburgh you will learn from world-leading researchers.

Students in geoscience lab

Our global reputation for teaching and research helps us to attract the international research community’s sharpest minds, which in turn means world-class teaching for our students.

Our world-class academics are leaders in their fields, conducting groundbreaking research that directly informs the teaching you receive. 

As a student at Edinburgh you will work alongside these academics and learn about the very latest developments in your subject.

Our approach to sharing knowledge and encouraging learning is recognised nationally and internationally. This ranges from the Royal Academy of Engineering adopting our Exemplars of Teaching Excellence to our pioneering development of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). 

Join us and be part of an enthusiastic community of pioneers, visionaries and scholars, studying the latest developments in your subject with the prospect of working on life-changing research yourself.

Edinburgh is renowned for biomedical research and I like that lecturers incorporate the latest developments into their teaching material. It keeps you up to date with what issues are facing scientists today.

Undergraduate student in Medical Sciences

International impact

Our academics’ research achievements have global implications:

  • Nobel Prize winner Emeritus Professor Peter Higgs was a lecturer at Edinburgh when he proposed the Higgs boson
  • we devised technology used in today’s smartphones
  • our scientists created Dolly the Sheep, the first mammal to be cloned from an adult somatic cell
  • we created the first genetically engineered hepatitis B vaccine
  • we pioneered the first automated industrial assembly robot
  • we have influenced thinking across the humanities for more than 400 years, from our central role in the European Enlightenment and the launch of the first English Literature department over 250 years ago, to our continuing record of publishing era-defining works

We’re still working towards historic firsts today - new treatments for major diseases such as multiple sclerosis, motor neurone disease and breast cancer; and innovative work to tackle climate change.

The University of Edinburgh is one of the world’s top research-intensive universities, ranked 4th in the UK for research power (Times Higher Education, Overall Ranking of Institutions), with 90% of our research activity classified as world leading or internationally excellent in the 2021 Research Excellence Framework (REF).

Global collaborations

We collaborate with partners worldwide in fields as diverse as e-science, engineering, life and medical sciences, and arts and culture. Our global engagement plan ensures world-class experiences are available as you study while our partnerships ensure our teaching and research benefits communities globally.

Our current partnerships with leading universities include:

  • University of Amsterdam
  • California Institute of Technology
  • University of Copenhagen
  • University of Delhi
  • University College Dublin
  • ETH Zurich
  • Fudan University
  • Heidelberg University
  • University of Helsinki
  • KU Leuven
  • Leiden University
  • University of Melbourne
  • National University of Singapore
  • Peking University
  • University of Pennsylvania
  • Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile
  • University of Toronto