University College, Bristol was an educational institution which existed from 1876 to 1909. It was the predecessor institution to the University of Bristol, which gained a royal charter in 1909. During its time the college mainly served the middle classes of Bristol, and catered for young men who had entered a family business and needed a greater understanding of scientific topics.
William Johnson Sollas (30 May 1849 – 20 October 1936) was a British geologist and anthropologist. After studying at the City of London School, the Royal College of Chemistry and the Royal School of Mines he matriculated to St. John's College, Cambridge, where he was awarded First Class Honours in geology. After some time spent as a University Extension lecturer he became lecturer in Geology and Zoology at University College, Bristol in 1879, where he stayed until he was offered the post of Professor of Geology at Trinity College Dublin. In 1897 he was offered the post of Professor of Geology at the University of Oxford, which he accepted.
Considered "one of the last true geological polymaths", Sollas worked in a number of areas including the study of sponges, brachiopods and petrological research, and during his lifetime published 180 papers and wrote three books. He also invented the serial sectioning device for the study of fossils. His biggest contribution at Oxford was in expanding the University geology department, hiring new Demonstrators and Lecturers and expanding the facilities available to students. Described as "eccentric" in his final years, he left much of the running of the Department to J.A. Douglas while he concentrated on research, finally dying in office on 20 October 1936.
University College London, which operates as UCL, is a public research university in London, England. It is a member institution of the federal University of London, and is the second-largest university in the United Kingdom by total enrolment and the largest by postgraduate enrolment.
Established in 1826 as London University (although without university status or degree-awarding powers) by founders who were inspired by the radical ideas of Jeremy Bentham, UCL was the first university institution to be established in London, and the first in England to be entirely secular and to admit students regardless of their religion. It was also, in 1878, among the first university colleges to admit women alongside men, two years after University College, Bristol, had done so. Intended by its founders to be England's third university, politics forced it to accept the status of a college in 1836, when it received a royal charter and became one of the two founding colleges of the University of London, although it achieved de facto recognition as a university in the 1990s and formal university status in 2023. It has grown through mergers, including with the Institute of Ophthalmology (in 1995), the Institute of Neurology (in 1997), the Royal Free Hospital Medical School (in 1998), the Eastman Dental Institute (in 1999), the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (in 1999), the School of Pharmacy (in 2012) and the Institute of Education (in 2014).
Reginald Innes Pocock, F.R.S. (4 March 1863 – 9 August 1947) was a British zoologist.
Pocock was born in Clifton, Bristol, the fourth son of Rev. Nicholas Pocock and Edith Prichard. He began showing interest in natural history at St. Edward's School, Oxford. He received tutoring in zoology from Sir Edward Poulton, and was allowed to explore comparative anatomy at the Oxford Museum. He studied biology and geology at University College, Bristol, under Conwy Lloyd Morgan and William Johnson Sollas. In 1885, he became an assistant at the Natural History Museum, and worked in the section of entomology for a year. He was put in charge of the collections of Arachnida and Myriapoda. He was also given the task of arranging the British bird collections, in the course of which he developed a lasting interest in ornithology. The 200 papers he published in his 18 years at the museum soon brought him recognition as an authority on Arachnida and Myriapoda; he described between 300 and 400 species of millipedes alone, and also described the scorpion genus Brachistosternus. In 1929, he proposed the family Nandiniidae, with the genus Nandinia as its sole member. He argued that it differs from the Aeluroidea by the structure and shape of its ear canal and mastoid part of the temporal bone.
The University of Bristol is a public research university in Bristol, England. It received its royal charter in 1909, although it can trace its roots to a Merchant Venturers' school founded in 1595 and University College, Bristol, which had been in existence since 1876. Bristol Medical School, founded in 1833, was merged with the University College in 1893, and later became the university's school of medicine.
The university is organised into three academic faculties composed of multiple schools and departments running over 200 undergraduate courses, largely in the Tyndall's Park area of the city. It had a total income of £1.16 billion in 2024–25, of which £342.1 million was from research grants and contracts, with an expenditure of £1.09 billion. It is the largest independent employer in Bristol. Current academics include 23 fellows of the Academy of Medical Sciences, 13 fellows of the British Academy, 43 fellows of the Academy of Social Sciences, 13 fellows of the Royal Academy of Engineering and 48 fellows of the Royal Society. The University of Bristol's alumni and faculty include 13 Nobel laureates.