University of Los Andes

The University of los Andes, also commonly self-styled as Uniandes, is a private research university located in the city centre of Bogotá, Colombia. Founded in 1948 by a group of Colombian intellectuals led by Mario Laserna Pinzón, it was the first Colombian university established as nonsectarian (independent from any political party or religious institution). Uniandes has traditionally educated the Latin American academic elite, and is broadly considered to be one of the best universities in this region. The university is academically composed of nine schools, three special academic entities — the Alberto Lleras Camargo School of Government, the Center for Research and Training in Education (Spanish: Centro de Investigación y Formación en Educación, CIFE), and the Interdisciplinary Center for Development Studies (Spanish: Centro Interdisciplinario de Estudios sobre Desarrollo, CIDER) — and a joint academic venture with the medical institution Santa Fe de Bogotá Foundation, offering 31 undergraduate, 18 doctoral, and 38 graduate degree-granting programs in areas of human knowledge such as medicine, engineering, science, law and others. The university has given birth to 128 research groups recognized by Colciencias, most of them in the social sciences, mathematics, physics and engineering. It is one of the few Colombian universities to have received high quality institutional accreditation by the Colombian Ministry of Education, given in January 2015. Los Andes has consistently been regarded as one of the best Colombian universities, one of the top 10 in Latin America and one of the top 300 world universities according to both the QS World Top University Ranking and the Times Higher Education Classification.