By Laura Kurtzman and Nicholas Roznovsky
Many of the UCSF Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences' nationally ranked psychiatry education programs will soon be housed or co-located in the new, state-of-the-art UCSF Nancy Friend Pritzker Psychiatry Building.
UC San Francisco's psychiatry program has been ranked fourth in the nation in U.S. News & World Report's annual survey of the best graduate and professional schools. For the fourth consecutive year, UCSF is also the top public university for graduate and professional psychiatry programs in the United States.
U.S. News' 2023 rankings for medical specialty areas are based on ratings made by medical school deans and senior faculty at peer institutions who are asked to identify schools offering the best programs in each specialty. This is only the fifth consecutive year that U.S. News has included psychiatry as a specialty ranking for medical schools, and UCSF has been included in the top five schools in each of those years.
As a whole, UCSF received top ratings in this year’s medical school rankings. The UCSF School of Medicine was the only school ranked in the top five in training the next medical generation in both research and primary care, tying for third in research and placing second in primary care.
For the second year, U.S. News included a diversity ranking, and four University of California medical schools were highly ranked. UC Davis was third, UCSF tied with UC Riverside for eleventh, and UCLA was number 14 on the list. All four schools ranked in the top ten among public institutions.
UCSF was also the only medical school ranked in the top ten in all of the specialty areas covered in the survey: anesthesiology, family medicine, internal medicine, obstetrics and gynecology, pediatrics, psychiatry, radiology, and surgery.
“Our strengths in research, primary care, diversity, and the full range of medical specialties once again shows the impact we’ve had in transforming education for the physicians and scientists of the future, and our continued focus on improving diversity, equity, and inclusion,” said Talmadge E. King Jr., MD, dean of the School of Medicine. “We share these honors with our faculty, staff, and learners, and take pride in being a public institution with a strong mission to serve the people of California.”
The UCSF School of Nursing's psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner program was also ranked fourth nationally in its category this year.
The U.S. News rankings are based on data provided by schools, as well as information from surveys of school leaders. Other factors include the amount of funding that faculty receive from the National Institutes of Health; the rates at which graduates enter primary care residencies in family practice, pediatrics and internal medicine; how selective each school is in admitting students; and the ratio of full-time science and clinical faculty to medical students. Medical specialty areas are ranked based on ratings made by medical school deans and senior faculty at peer institutions.
The diversity ranking is based on the proportion of students who come from groups that are underrepresented in medicine (URM), and for public schools like UCSF, how that compares to a state’s population. URMs include students who are Black or African American, Hispanic/Latino, American Indian or Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander.
U.S. News' rankings are published in the magazine’s 2023 issue of “Best Graduate Schools.”
About UCSF Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences
The UCSF Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and the Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute are among the nation's foremost resources in the fields of child, adolescent, adult, and geriatric mental health. Together they constitute one of the largest departments in the UCSF School of Medicine and the UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences, with a mission focused on research (basic, translational, clinical), teaching, patient care, and public service.
UCSF Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences conducts its clinical, educational, and research efforts at a variety of locations in Northern California, including Langley Porter Psychiatric Hospital; UCSF Medical Centers at Parnassus Heights, Mission Bay, and Mount Zion; UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospitals in San Francisco and Oakland; Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center; the San Francisco VA Health Care System; UCSF Fresno; and numerous community-based sites around the San Francisco Bay Area.
About the UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences
The UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences, established by the extraordinary generosity of Joan and Sanford I. "Sandy" Weill, brings together world-class researchers with top-ranked physicians to solve some of the most complex challenges in the human brain.
The UCSF Weill Institute leverages UCSF’s unrivaled bench-to-bedside excellence in the neurosciences. It unites three UCSF departments—Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Neurology, and Neurological Surgery—that are highly esteemed for both patient care and research, as well as the Neuroscience Graduate Program, a cross-disciplinary alliance of nearly 100 UCSF faculty members from 15 basic-science departments, as well as the UCSF Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases, a multidisciplinary research center focused on finding effective treatments for Alzheimer’s disease, frontotemporal dementia, Parkinson’s disease, and other neurodegenerative disorders.
About UCSF
The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) is exclusively focused on the health sciences and is dedicated to promoting health worldwide through advanced biomedical research, graduate-level education in the life sciences and health professions, and excellence in patient care. UCSF Health, which serves as UCSF’s primary academic medical center, includes top-ranked specialty hospitals and other clinical programs, and has affiliations throughout the Bay Area.
