University College Cork was founded in 1845 as one of three Queen’s Colleges located in Belfast, Cork, and Galway.[3] It became University College, Cork, under the Irish Universities Act of 1908. The Universities Act 1997 renamed the university as National University of Ireland, Cork, and a Ministerial Order of 1998 renamed the university as University College Cork – National University of Ireland, Cork,[4] though it continues to be almost universally known as University College Cork.

Amongst other rankings and awards, the university was named Irish University of the Year by the Sunday Times on four occasions; most recently in 2015/2016.[5] In 2015, UCC was also named as top performing university by the European Commission funded U-Multirank system, based on obtaining the highest number of "A" scores (21 out of 28 metrics) among a field of 1200 partaking universities.[6] UCC also became the first university to achieve the ISO 50001 standard in energy management in 2011. read more