The University of California, Berkeley is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Founded in 1868 and named after Anglo-Irish philosopher George Berkeley, it is the state's first land-grant university and the founding campus of the University of California system. Berkeley is also a founding member of the Association of American Universities. It has been regarded as one of the top universities in the world.

A research university or a research-intensive university is a university that is committed to research as a central part of its mission. They are "the key sites of knowledge production", along with "intergenerational knowledge transfer and the certification of new knowledge" through the awarding of doctoral degrees, and continue to be "the very center of scientific productivity". They can be public or private, and often have well-known brand names.