Willamette University

Overview

Willamette University

Willamette University (WU) is a private liberal arts higher education institution in Salem, Oregon. It was founded in 1842 as the Oregon Institute and received university status in 1852 and its current name in 1870. Known as the oldest college in the Western United States, WU established the first law school and medical school in the Pacific Northwest and is known for its programs in data science, arts, writing and critical studies, and MBA.

Willamette University Key Statistics

The university comprises several academic units such as College of Arts & Sciences, the College of Law, the Atkinson Graduate School of Management, and the Hallie Ford School of Graduate Studies in Art.

It offers over 50 undergraduate and postgraduate programs, including a joint-degree course that allows students to earn both a Juris Doctor and an MBA. Its most popular majors are economics, biology, and environmental science.

Notable alumni include one Nobel Prize laureate (Dale T. Mortensen, economics), 27 representatives, senators and governors, and 11 Oregon Supreme Court justices.

Willamette University's student population is approximately 2,179, with 1,620 undergraduates and 483 postgraduates. It employs 278 academic staff and 464 administrative staff, with a student-to-faculty ratio of 11:1.

Other Willamette University key statistics include its various campus facilities and notable buildings such as residential halls, the McCulloch Stadium, the Oregon Civic Justice Center, the Hallie Ford Museum of Art, and the Mary Stuart Rogers Music Center. It also houses the Martha Springer Botanical Garden and the Mark O. Hatfield Library, which holds several collections of over 350,000 volumes.

Willamette University Research

The university focuses on mentored student research. Its research projects are funded primarily by external federal agencies such as the National Cancer Institute, the National Science Foundation, and the National Institute of Mental Health.

The top fields of Willamette University research are medicine, psychology, and internal medicine. Its research outputs have been published in prestigious journals like Blood, the Journal of Chemical Education, and the Social Science Research Network.

Its researchers have attended major scholarly conferences such as SIGUCCS: User Services Conference, the International Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, and Neural Information Processing Systems.

The most cited Willamette University research publication is Aarts et al.'s (2015) “Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science.” This journal article was published in Science and has received 4,364 citations to date.

The university’s second most cited publication is Harrison et al.'s (2013) “The Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) High-Energy X-Ray Mission,” which appeared in The Astrophysical Journal and has been cited 1,259 times.

Moreover, WU’s third most cited publication is Gondi et al.'s (2014) “Preservation of memory with conformal avoidance of the hippocampal neural stem-cell compartment during whole-brain radiotherapy for brain metastases (RTOG 0933): A phase II multi-institutional trial,” which was featured in the Journal of Clinical Oncology and has received 713 citations.

In addition, Willamette is home to several research centers and institutes. These include the Center for Quantitative Understanding, Analysis, and Design (QUAD Center) and three centers of excellence such as the Center for Ancient Studies and Archaeology and the Center for Religion Law and Democracy.

You can also learn more about the educational performance of Willamette University in our ranking of US universities & colleges.