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UC Santa Cruz is the top public research university in the world for highly cited researchers amid strong 2025 list
25 UC Santa Cruz researchers earned a spot on the prestigious annual list.
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Twenty-five researchers associated with the University of California, Santa Cruz, earned a spot on the 2025 Highly Cited Researchers list by Clarivate, and an analysis by the same organization ranks UC Santa Cruz as the No. 1 public university in the United States for highly cited researchers and No. 5 in the world.
This prestigious annual list recognizes researchers globally whose papers rank in the top 1% by citations for their respective fields and year of publication, highlighting their substantial influence in the research community.
A Clarivate analysis of the Highly Cited Researchers lists from 2014 to 2024 finds that UC Santa Cruz is the top public research university, and the fifth institution overall, with the most researchers who have consistently appeared on the list over this 10-year period. Also in the top five are Harvard University, the U.S. National Institutes of Health, the Max Planck Society, and Stanford University. The analysis notes that if the UC system was accounted as a single institution rather than individual campuses, the system would be first in the world.
Faculty on the 2025 list include: Jonathan Fortney, professor of astronomy and astrophysics; Garth Illingworth, distinguished professor emeritus of astronomy and astrophysics; David Haussler, distinguished professor of biomolecular engineering and director of the UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute; Karen Miga, associate professor of biomolecular engineering; Benedict Paten, professor of biomolecular engineering; and Yat Li, professor of chemistry and biochemistry.
Staff researchers on the list include: Mark Diekhans, technical director of the Genomics Institute’s Computational Genomics Laboratory, and James Kent, creator and former director of the UC Santa Cruz Genome Browser, along with Genomics Institute research and bioinformatics staff members: Galt Barber, Jonathan Casper, Hiram Clawson, Jairo Navarro Gonzalez, Maximilian Haeussler, Angie Hinrichs, Robert Kuhn, Brian Lee, Christopher Lee, Brian Raney, Kate Rosenbloom, Matthew Speir, and Ann Zweig. Daniel Magee, a staff programmer with the UC Observatories, also made the list.
Three researchers who specify UC Santa Cruz as their secondary affiliation made the list: Steven Bograd, adjunct professor of ocean sciences; Elliot Hazen, associate adjunct professor of ecology and evolutionary biology; and Rychard Bouwens, former UC Santa Cruz postdoctoral fellow and now an associate professor at Leiden University in the Netherlands.
Overall, this year Clarivate recognized 6,868 researchers from more than 1,300 institutions and representing 61 countries and regions. The full list can be found here, and the methodology can be explored here.