Biology is often defined as the study and characterization of living organisms and the investigation of the science behind living things. If you are interested in biology sciences, we will help you find the best universities in the world for biology. If you are interested in engineering and technology degrees, this is what you should necessarily read our article about the 20 best engineering colleges in America.
Modern biology is composed of many branches and subdisciplines. Some of the areas in which you can specialize biological sciences are: anatomy, biophysics, forensic biology, computational biology, ecology and evolution, environmental biology, genetics, marine biology, microbiology, cell biology, and molecular biology and bio-sciences, natural science, animal behavior, botany, conservation, ecology and the environment, neurobiology, physiology, zoology and many others. Some of the most famous biologists such as Charles Darwin, Louis Pasteur, and Gregor Mendel contributed to the scientific world with their discoveries and they have improved not only our understanding of history but also our quality of living.
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You are probably wondering what you can expect from your biology degrees nowadays? The most popular biological careers today are the ones in research, health care, environmental conservation, biotechnology and forensic sciences. If you want to be a primary or secondary teacher, you will only need an undergraduate degree and a teacher training qualification. But of course if you want to work at a university, you will need a master’s degree or Ph.D. A graduate degree in biology qualifies you for a range of careers. As we all know, biotechnology is becoming increasingly significant in both the public and private sectors. The section in healthcare has a huge hiring capacity; the biologists are always welcome to help research illnesses such as AIDS, cancer, heart disease…If you are passionate about the environment and want to encourage others to enjoy and protect it, you might work as a nature conservation officer, sustainable development officer, project officers or biodiversity officer, etc . You’ll work to protect the environment (grassland, woodland, forests…). Part of the role is to encourage people to use the countryside and promote awareness of the natural environment. If you are interested in forensic science, you specialize in the crime scene examination, forensic anthropology, etc. Biotechnology is connected with agriculture and food sciences, and no need to emphasize that pharmaceutical sector is in a constant need of biologists.
In order to make our list, we used two sources of primary data, “Top 100 QS World University Rankings for biological sciences” and “Best Global Universities for Biology and Biochemistry“. We will calculate the average ranking for each university, use that data to rank universities and make our own unique list of 10 best universities for biology in the world.
Let us take a moment and explain why combining multiple sources into a single “consensus” estimate produces better results. When you are using an indirect approach to produce an estimate for anything, your estimate is always biased in one or multiple ways in various magnitudes. When you combine two or more approaches it is more likely that some of these biases cancel out and the resulting estimate is more accurate. For example if you are trying to predict an election’s outcome by using a single poll, your estimates will contain a large margin of error. However, if you combine estimates from multiple polls conducted by different pollsters, the estimates will have smaller margins of error and will usually have higher accuracy.
We have been using this same approach at Insider Monkey to identify the best stocks to invest in the stock market by calculating the consensus picks of 700+ hedge fund managers. Any hedge fund manager may be biased in one direction or the other at any point in time. However, our research had shown that their consensus stock picks actually beat the market by double digits annually in a back testing covering 13 years. At the end of August 2012 we launched an investment newsletter being encouraged by these promising results. Guess how this strategy performed in the 3 years since August 2012? One word: amazing. The strategy returned 102% in its first 3 years versus a gain of 48.8% for the S&P 500 ETF (SPY). You can read the details of this investment strategy here. Our strategy doesn’t beat the market every month but on average it produced much better returns on average. This is generally the case when we use multiple sources to calculate a consensus estimate.
Now, let’s check out the rankings for the 11 best universities in the world for biology:
