Southern Medical University

Southern Medical University, formerly known as the First Military Medical University of the People 's Liberation Army of China, was founded in 1951. It was designated as a national key university in 1979 and was transferred to Guangdong Province in August 2004 and renamed Southern Medical University. The university is the only medical college among the first five provincial key construction universities in Guangdong Province, one of the first "ministry-province" co-built medical colleges, one of the first eight universities to offer an eight-year clinical medicine program (undergraduate-to-doctoral program), and one of the first universities to pilot the education and training program for outstanding doctors and outstanding doctors (traditional Chinese medicine).

Located at the foot of the scenic Baiyun Mountain in Guangzhou, the university has two campuses, namely the Guangzhou Campus and the Shunde Campus, covering an area of nearly 1.7 million square meters and having a building area of 1.224 million square meters.

The school has 22 teaching institutions and currently has more than 20,000 full-time students, including over 10,000 postgraduates, over 13,000 undergraduates and over 1,000 international students. There are 8 affiliated hospitals and 9 co-built hospitals, among which 13 are tertiary grade A hospitals, with about 22,000 beds available and about 28 million person-times of medical services provided annually.

The university has the authority to confer doctoral and master's degrees in all medical disciplines and 10 postdoctoral research stations. 23 national first-class undergraduate programs and 61 first-class undergraduate courses have been approved, both ranking first among all medical colleges and universities in the country. A discipline system has been formed with medicine as the main discipline and coordinated development of science, engineering, law, management, education and other disciplines. 15 disciplines, including clinical medicine, pharmacology and toxicology, molecular biology and genetics, biology and biochemistry, neuroscience and behavior, immunology, chemistry, materials science, microbiology, general social sciences, agricultural sciences, environment and ecology, psychiatry and psychology, engineering, and computer science, have entered the top 1% of ESI globally. Among them, clinical medicine is in the top 0.36‰ of ESI globally, and pharmacology and toxicology are in the top 0.27‰. In The Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2026, Southern Medical University is ranked among the top 300 in the world and first among independent medical universities in China.

The university has more than 2,000 full-time faculty members, including 377 national high-level talents such as academicians and Changjiang Scholars, and a number of internationally renowned experts such as academicians of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, and the French Academy of Sciences are visiting professors. The university has a number of national and provincial-level research platforms, including national key laboratories, national clinical medical research centers, and Greater Bay Area Brain Science and brain-like research centers. The number of projects funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China has ranked among the top 30 in the country for 10 consecutive years. A series of research results have been published in top international journals such as Science, Cell, Nature, JAMA and NEJM.

Since 2005, the university has been offering undergraduate (English-taught) clinical medicine education programs for international students, and since 2006, it has recruited Chinese government scholarship students. To date, it has recruited more than 3,500 degree students from 121 countries. The school is one of the ten educational aid bases of the Ministry of Education and a key training unit of the Ministry of Commerce. It has trained 3,926 medical education administrators, medical and health officials and professionals for 124 friendly countries.

The school has extensive international exchanges and has established friendly relations with 87 renowned universities, research institutions and medical institutions in 24 countries and regions around the world. It has carried out various forms and channels of exchanges and cooperation, including Sino-foreign cooperative education, research cooperation, joint student training, teacher training and further education.