Q: What is the relation between the University Medical Center Groningen and the University of Groningen?

A: The UMCG, with a thousand beds, is the second-largest teaching hospital of the Netherlands. Within the UMCG, a lot of clinical and basic research takes place. The UMCG however is a separate legal entity from the University of Groningen (UG). Nevertheless, all students enrolled in degree programs (bachelor, master, PhD) at the UMCG receive their degree from UG, a Top-100 university in the major world rankings. Full professors employed by the UMCG also have an appointment at RUG. So at the UMCG, teaching, research and patient care take place at one campus. Click for an overview of the UMCG campus. It has everything under one roof: patients, education, clinical research, pre-clinical research, pharmacy/drug delivery departments, a GMP facility, and even on-site spin-off companies.

To give you an idea: the UMCG has an annual research output of over 2,000 scientific articles and over 220 PhD theses defenses (2018). The UMCG accounts for about 40% of all the research carried out at the University of Groningen.

We have an internal commitment to quality: if you are a research master or PhD student at the UMCG, you will be taught and supervised by academic staff who qualify as Principal Investigators (PIs). Every year the academic output of our researchers is measured, and only those who have published at least eight peer-reviewed research articles in journals that belong to the top 25% of a relevant ISI field over the past three years qualify as PIs.