They benefit from world-class faculty mentors, renowned research centers and institutes, and extensive partnerships with organizations representing industries as diverse as space science and social work. Whether they choose to pursue degrees at the master’s or doctoral level, UNH graduate students learn how to apply cutting-edge research methods to solving real-world challenges, and their research regularly helps them receive competitive fellowships from organizations such as EPA, Ford, Merck, NASA, NIH, NOAA, and NSF. To find out more about our students, faculty and alum, visit our Explore the UNH Graduate School
As of 2019, UNH is among the 130 doctoral-granting universities in the “very high research activity,” or R1, category, as designated by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education. The Carnegie Classification is the leading framework for describing the diversity of the more than 4,000 colleges and universities in the United States. Updated every three years, the quantitative analysis is widely used by state legislatures, federal agencies, grant-making institutions, news media and others.
This top Carnegie classification signals that UNH is among the most research-intensive, doctoral-producing universities in the nation, and indicates to federal and state agencies, private foundations and philanthropists, and business and industry professionals that UNH has the capacity to conduct high-quality research and education. UNH is one of three New England public universities categorized as R1, along with the University of Connecticut and University of Massachusetts-Amherst, both of which are nearly double the size of UNH. Further, only 43 universities in the country without medical schools, UNH included, made this top tier. This classification speaks to the excellence of UNH faculty and graduate students, who conduct cutting-edge research that attracts more than $110 million in competitive external funding each year. Research strengths include space physics, Earth and the environment, marine science and ocean mapping, vulnerable populations and American history. Read more about UNH's R1 status.
Research at UNH
UNH research has had a notably positive impact on the community across a broad range of research areas, due to the efforts of faculty, students, and staff working in the colleges and focused research centers and institutes. Learn more about research at UNH.
High impact and increasingly international in reputation, UNH Graduate Faculty include dozens of recipients of the Fulbright Fellowship. UNH recently received a three-year $1.3 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to support the advancement and leadership of women faculty in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. EOS is UNH's largest research enterprise, receiving approximately $38 million each year in research support from NASA, NOAA, NSF and other federal agencies.
The UNH Research Office hosts a multitude of resources to help graduate students and post-docs navigate the complex process of doing research, finding aid, writing grants, and making sure they are familiar with policies relating to human and animal research, intellectual property, and misconduct policy. Some of the useful resources they offer are:
ProQuest keeps an online database of published dissertations and theses from UNH. The archive includes dissertation citations back to 1861, abstracts back to 1980 and 24-page previews for all dissertations after 1997.
Through ProQuest you can find the full-text of most Univ. of New Hampshire dissertations from 1997 onward and theses from 2006 onward. Access is for faculty, students, staff, and on-site visitors to the UNH Library. See these instructions for off-campus access.