Universidad de los Andes

The University of The Andes (Spanish: Universidad de los Andes), also commonly self-styled as Uniandes, is a private research university located in the city centre of Bogotá, Colombia. Founded in 1948 by a group of Colombian intellectuals led by Mario Laserna Pinzón, it was the first Colombian university established as nonsectarian (independent from any political party or religious institution) Los Andes has consistently been regarded as the best Colombian university and has been considered one of the top 5 Latin American universities and one of the top 250 world universities, according to both the QS World Top University Ranking and the Times Higher Education Classification.

The university is academically composed of nine schools, three special academic entities—the Alberto Lleras Camargo School of Government, the Center for Research and Training in Education (Spanish: Centro de Investigación y Formación en Educación, CIFE), and the Interdisciplinary Center for Development Studies (Spanish: Centro Interdisciplinario de Estudios sobre Desarrollo, CIDER)—and a joint academic venture with the medical institution Santa Fe de Bogotá Foundation, offering 31 undergraduate, 18 doctoral, and 38 graduate degree-granting programsin areas of human knowledge such as medicine, engineering, science, law and others.

As of 2011, the university had given birth to 128 research groups recognized by Colciencias, most of them in the social sciences, mathematics, physics and engineering. By 2017, the number of groups recognized by Colciencias has increased to 153 research groups. It is one of the few Colombian universities to have received the maximum high quality institutional accreditation by the Colombian Ministry of Education, given in January 2015