it the third-oldest university press in England. Students in this period were awarded external degrees by the University of London.
=== University status ===
Following a royal charter and an act of Parliament in 1903, it became an independent university (the University of Liverpool) with the right to confer its degrees. The next few years saw major developments at the university, including Sir Charles Sherrington's discovery of the synapse and William Blair-Bell's work on chemotherapy in the treatment of cancer. In the 1930s to 1940s, Sir James Chadwick and Sir Joseph Rotblat made major contributions to the development of the atomic bomb. From 1943 to 1966, Allan Downie, Professor of Bacteriology, was involved in the eradication of smallpox.
In 1994, the university was a founding member of the Russell Group, a collaboration of twenty leading research-intensive universities, as well as a founding member of the N8 Group in 2004. In the 21st century physicists, engineers and technicians from the University of Liverpool were involved in the construction of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, working on two of the four detectors in the LHC.
In 2004, Sylvan Learning, later known as Laureate International Universities, became the worldwide partner for University of Liverpool online. In 2019, it was announced that Kaplan Open Learning, part of Kaplan, Inc., would be the new partner for the University of Liverpool's online programmes. Laureate continued to provide some teaching provision for existing students until 2021.
The university has produced ten Nobel Prize winners, from the fields of science, medicine, economics and peace. The Nobel laureates include the physician Sir Ronald Ross, physicist Charles Barkla, physicist Martin Lewis Perl, the physiologist Sir Charles Sherrington, physicist Sir James Chadwick, chemist Sir Robert Robinson, chemist Har Gobind Khorana, physiologist Rodney Porter, economist Ronald Coase and physicist Joseph Rotblat. Sir Ronald Ross was also the first British Nobel laureate in 1902. The university …
