of the university's current academic staff include computer scientist Steve Furber, economist Richard Nelson, novelist Jeanette Winterson, and physicist Brian Cox.
=== Research ===
The University of Manchester is a major centre for research and a member of the Russell Group of leading British research universities. In the 2021 Research Excellence Framework, the university was ranked fifth in the UK in terms of research power and eighth for grade point average quality of staff submitted among multi-faculty institutions (tenth when including specialist institutions). In the 2014 Research Excellence Framework, the university was ranked fifth in the UK in terms of research power and fifteenth for grade point average quality of staff submitted among multi-faculty institutions (seventeenth when including specialist institutions). Manchester has the sixth largest research income of any English university (after Oxford, University College London (UCL), Cambridge, Imperial and King's College London), and has been informally referred to as part of a "golden diamond" of research-intensive UK institutions (adding Manchester to the Oxford–Cambridge–London "Golden Triangle"). Manchester has a strong record in terms of securing funding from the three main UK research councils, EPSRC, Medical Research Council (MRC) and Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), being ranked fifth, seventh and first respectively. In addition, the university is one of the richest in the UK in terms of income and interest from endowments: an estimate in 2008 placed it third, surpassed only by Oxford and Cambridge.
The University of Manchester has attracted the most research income from UK industry of any institution in the country. The figures, from the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA), show that Manchester attracted £24,831,000 of research income in 2016–2017 from UK industry, commerce and public corporations.
Historically, Manchester has been linked with high scientific achievement: the university and its constituent …
