Ghent University, or UGent, goes by the motto "dare to think". It is one of the most liberal educational institutions in Flanders: the official mission statement insists that the university encourages critical and creative thinking, welcomes all cultures and backgrounds and strives to entrench its social commitment and broaden its international horizons.

A bit of history
UGent began operating in 1817, much later than other Flemish universities. At the time, the city was part of the Southern Netherlands. Only 13 years later, this region split from the Netherlands, and Belgium was founded; UGent was hardly hit in the process and spent the next several decades building its student population to the 33,000 it boasts today, making it Flanders' second-largest university after the Catholic University of Leuven (KU Leuven).

At the end of the 19th century, universities earned the right to award degrees and developed their research departments, and Ghent University was swept by a modernisation wave.

In 1930, Ghent became the first Flemish university to teach its entire curriculum in Dutch. At its creation, the university's language was Latin. After 1830, French entered the curriculum, as it did all forms of education in the new Belgian state. Ghent gradually introduced Dutch, which gave many more Flemings the opportunity to study. Of course today, you'll find many programmes in English and English spoken among the thousands of international students and researchers based here.

Eight years later, Ghent-born medical researcher Corneel Heymans' work on the regulation of respiration earned him the Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine. Decades later, state reform extended the Belgian regions' decision power in education, and a 1991 decree gave universities more autonomy. Since then, Ghent University has been growing steadily.

Reaching the stars
University rankings are a delicate affair; they don't all use the same criteria and are often too dry to capture the atmosphere of a campus, or evaluate how the university integrates itself within the broader social reality of the country. Still, when a university scores high on most rankings, it's a sure sign that it's doing something right in a competitive environment.

UGent is the second-best Belgian university, according to the Leiden ranking, which evaluates the impact of scientific publications. The influential Times Higher Education consistently ranks UGent third in Belgium, behind KU Leuven and UC Louvain.

This year, Ghent University proudly reached the authoritative Shanghai ranking's top 100. Its 90th position is 30 places up from 2005. It is the first Belgian university to make it to the top 100 since the ranking's creation in 2003, a mark that reflects the institution's excellent research facilities.

World-class research
Ghent University is big on natural sciences: Rector Paul Van Cauwenberge is a professor of medicine, and vice rector Luc Moens is a chemist. In particular, UGent is keen on life sciences. Earlier this year, the university picked five of its strongest fields (photonics, biotechnology and engineering, immunology and molecular imaging, neurosciences and bioinformatics) and launched research partnerships to attract the brightest brains in Europe.

"We cannot compete with the major foreign universities in financial terms," says the vice-rector. "But the academics are primarily convinced by the scientific challenge... the present expertise of the researchers working here, the infrastructure and, in particular, the ambitions of the research groups."

That ambition is to become no less than world leaders in these areas. Last year, the university spent some €213 million on research. UGent also aims to attract scientists armed with funding they have earned elsewhere. The European Research Council (ERC) is one of the most prestigious funding bodies; set up by the European Union, it awards five-year research grants to the most promising researchers, whatever their origin or discipline.

Six ERC-funded researchers have chosen UGent's labs for their work - ranging from nanoporous materials to the study of 15th-century Egypt - and four more will start later this year. Locally, the Research Foundation Flanders' Odysseus programme also lures first-class scientists into the region, awarding them funding to run their own scientific projects at Flemish universities. AtUGent, the Odysseus programme finances various research projects, including experimental psychology, English language, particle physics and plant biology.

Driving entrepreneurship
According to a recent study by the ARC Centre of Excellence in Australia, Ghent's department of plant systems biology is simply the best in the world. This department is a joint venture of UGent and the Flanders Interuniversity Institute of Biotechnology (VIB) - an institute for gene technology that combines basic research with pro-active technology transfer to accelerate the use of research results for the creation of commercial products by home- grown start-up companies.

UGent is generally keen on developing entrepreneurship in the region: in 2008, it teamed up with the City of Ghent and the Development Agency of East Flanders to launch Gent BC (Big in Creativity), an on- and offline networking service for budding science-based companies around Ghent. Its goal is to achieve 10 new spin-offs per year.

www.ugent.be

International students
Ghent University is home to about 33,000 students and more than 7,500 staff, spread across 11 faculties. The largest are medicine, psychology and education, with the arts and philosophy close behind. Foreign students are most numerous in the sciences - about one-third of bioscience engineering students are from abroad, and a quarter in veterinary science (mostly due to Dutch or German neighbours escaping strictly capped student numbers).

Exchange students abound in the scientific disciplines, too. Ghent is particularly popular as a study destination among Spanish and Polish students taking part in the EU's Erasmus scheme. The newer Erasmus Mundus programme, funded by the European Commission, broadens horizons even further. It offers joint degrees in at least two European universities and awards scholarships to the best students from Europe and beyond. UGent has happily jumped on the Mundus train and takes part in eight such international Master's programmes, with topics ranging from rural development to marine biodiversity, through to fire safety engineering.