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Top U.S. research university in EDA(Section #1)UC Berkeley EECS is a clear winner by far.Their research spans from electronic system-level (ESL) design and verification to technology CAD (TCAD). No other research university has that range of research teams/labs/groups that span so many EDA topics. The collaborators of UC Berkeley's faculty and students include many of their alumni, the academic descendants of Berkeley EECS alumni, and industry and academic collaborators from all over the world. Two of their faculty members, Prof. Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli and the late Prof. A. Richard Newton contributed greatly to the founding of two of the three giants in electronic design automation (EDA): Synopsys (company) and Cadence Design Systems (company). Their alumni have become successful faculty members in world-class research universities, like MIT and Stanford. Their graduate classes in EDA also span from TCAD (e.g., device modeling) and physical design to logic synthesis and verification, and also from ESL design and cyber-physical systems (CPS) to Bio Design Automation and VLSI formal verification (e.g., sequential equivalence checking).Good U.S. research universities in EDA(Section #2)Off the top of my head, other good research universities that have good EDA labs (at least 2-3 faculty members working in EDA) and multiple graduate-level EDA classes include (not listed in any order):University of Michigan: physical design, logic synthesis, EDA for quantum computing, logic verification, and post-silicon debugging. Prof. Igor Markov is a professor at Michigan's EECS department.Massachusetts Institute of Technology: Numerical techniques (e.g., nonlinear Model Order Reduction, integral equation solvers) for EDA, including circuit simulation, interconnect modeling, and layout/parasitic extraction; check out the Computational Prototyping Group at MIT's legendary Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE). Prof. Arvind and Prof. Srini Devadas have worked on problems in ESL, and logic synthesis and logic verification.Carnegie Mellon University. They work on problems in analog/RF and mixed-signal (AMS/RF) CAD, Design for Manufacturability (DFM), EDA tools for network-on-chips (NoC)... They also have graduate classes in physical design and logic synthesis/verification.Cornell University: EDA tools for Asynchronous Circuits, TCAD, physical design, ESL, VLSI testingGeorgia Institute of Technology: Nanoscale 3-D physical design and circuit simulation (or rather, numerical techniques for EDA).Northwestern University: physical design, thermal-aware EDA tools, and FPGA CAD tools.Purdue University: VLSI testing, and a range of topics addressing nanoscale challenges concerning variability and reliability, model order reduction for VLSI circuits and systems, physical design, and interconnect modeling.Stanford University: range of "non-traditional" EDA projects spanning multiple traditional EDA topics, TCAD, EDA tools addressing reliability concerns, and VLSI testing. They also used to work on VLSI formal verification.Texas A&M University (TAMU): Physical design, numerical techniques for EDA (including power grid verification) and AMS/RF CAD, NoC, EDA tools addressing fault-tolerance, DFM, logic synthesis, and ESL... Texas A&M University (TAMU) is not as famous as the other universities, but it does produce stellar research papers. For example, Prof. Peng Li has won 4 best paper awards at Design Automation Conference (DAC) and International Conference on Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD) in the last 10 years, which is 20% of the best paper awards for DAC and ICCAD in this time frame.University of California, San Diego: DFM, physical design, ESL, and VLSI testingUniversity of California, Los Angeles: physical design, logic synthesis, ESL (including high-level synthesis), DFM, and numerical techniques for EDA (including model order reduction and interconnect modeling).The University of Texas at Austin: DFM, physical design, VLSI formal verification, VLSI testing, and TCADAlso, see Choosing a Graduate Program in VLSI Design & Related Areas: Things to Consider.Competitive U.S. research universities in EDA (Honorable Mention)(Section #3)Honorable mention:University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: numerical techniques for EDA (including model order reduction, layout/parasitic extraction, and interconnect modeling)... I may be wrong, but I reckon they have other stuff. However, they do not seem to be prominent in EDA, even though UIUC is a world-class research university.Brown University: EDA tools for thermal analysis/design, VLSI testing, and some other topicsBoston University: There are 2-3 faculty members working in EDA there, including Prof. Douglas Densmore work works in Bio Design Automation.University of California, Irvine: Has a strong research lab/group in ESL, including high-level synthesisUniversity of California, Riverside: numerical techniques for EDA (including model order reduction, layout/parasitic extraction, and interconnect modeling), application-specific instruction-set processor (ASIP) synthesis and design methodologies, and low-power EDA. They may have professors working on ESL and logic synthesis, too.University of California, Santa Barbara: VLSI testing, logic verification, and physical design. They may also be working on logic synthesis.University of Southern California: physical design, physical synthesis, logic synthesis, logic verification, EDA tools for Asynchronous Circuits, EDA for Quantum Computing, ESL, VLSI testing, EDA tools for low-power design, and NoC.University of Minnesota - Twin Cities: physical design and physical synthesis, logic synthesis and verification, and numerical techniques for EDA (to some extent)The University of Utah: Design automation for Cyber-Physical Systems, Bio Design Automation, EDA tools for Asynchronous Circuits, and VLSI formal verificationUniversity of Wisconsin - Madison: physical design, physical synthesis, DFM, EDA for reconfigurable logic (e.g., FPGA), post-silicon debugging, low-power EDA tools, EDA tools for fault-tolerance, and VLSI testingSufficiently Competitive U.S. research universities in EDA(Section #4)Other research universities that may interest you:Arizona State University: Strong TCAD group in device modelingColumbia University: EDA tools for Asynchronous CircuitsDuke University: Design automation for Microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) (microelectromechanical systems) and digital microfluidic devices (biomedical devices), and VLSI testingUniversity of Arizona: A bunch of faculty members in VLSI testing, interconnect modeling, DFM, NoC, among other thingsUniversity of California, Davis: ESL groupUniversity of California, Santa Cruz: physical design groupUniversity of Massachusetts, Amherst: Kinda like University of Arizona; it has a bunch of decent faculty members working on different things... TCAD, VLSI testing, and EDA for reconfigurable logic (e.g., FPGA)University of Notre Dame: ESL???University of Pennsylvania: EDA tools for nanoscale reconfigurable logicUniversity of Rochester: Lone maverick working on numerical techniques for EDA (e.g., interconnect modeling), physical synthesis, physical design, and AMS/RF CADIowa State University: Physical designColorado State University (specifically, Colorado State University ): ESLAuburn University: VLSI testing. TCAD, and computational electromagneticsUniversity of Maryland, College Park: TCAD, approximate computing, energy-efficient EDA tools, and DFMNorth Carolina State University: AMS/RF CAD, and random topics in EDA, just like University of Massachusetts, Amherst and University of ArizonaUniversity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: EDA tools for Asynchronous CircuitsStony Brook University: ESL and AMS/RF CADPortland State University (Portland State University): VLSI formal verification, VLSI testing, and ESL (and Bio Design Automation???)University of Pittsburgh: mixed-technology design automation tools, including design automation tools for OptoelectronicsSouthern Methodist University: VLSI testing, logic synthesis, and logic verificationDrexel University: physical design and NoCDecent/"Decent" U.S. research universities in EDA(Section #5)If you can't get into the aforementioned universities, here are some other universities that may be of interest to you. They have at least one lone faculty member working in EDA.Southern Illinois University CarbondaleUniversity of IowaUniversity of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC): Power modelingMichigan State University: Computational electromagneticsMichigan Technological University: TCAD and numerical techniques for EDAMissouri University of Science & Technology: electromagnetic compatibility, like signal integrity analysisUniversity of North Carolina at Charlotte: AMS/RF CADUniversity at Buffalo: VLSI testingUniversity of Cincinnati: lone ranger working on digtial EDA, who had worked on AMS/RF CAD tools.Utah State UniversityThe University of Texas at San Antonio: physical design, DFM, and physical synthesisUniversity of North Texas: AMS/RF CAD based on meta-heuristicsIllinois Institute of Technology Chicago - Illinois Tech: power grid simulation of Very-Large-Scale Integration systemsUniversity of South CarolinaWell, if you are considering these places, you may as well check out opportunities in Europe (e.g., see Computer Science Programs in Europe, Pasquale Ferrara's answer to When recruiting Software Engineer/Computer Science majors for US companies, what international universities are on par with MIT/Stanford?, and Pasquale Ferrara's answer to Which university is best to recruit computer science majors from and why?) and Taiwan (e.g., National Taiwan University and National Tsing Hua University). Also, Federal University of Rio Grande Do Sul (UFRGS) is also making some noise in EDA in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) (and perhaps Seoul National University) seems like a reasonable choice.For graduate programs in EDA, I would strongly recommend that you do not go to graduate school in India, Singapore, or Australia.If you want me to make a recommendation, if you cannot get into a good/competitive U.S. research university in EDA (see sections 1-3, or perhaps sections 1-4), it may be worth your while to go look at other competitive research universities outside the U.S., such as National Taiwan University (NTU). NTU has done well (placed top 3 regularly in the last 5 years) in EDA programming/research contests, such as the ISPD programming contest and the CADathlon (held before the start of ICCAD). See Learning about Physical Design outside of National Taiwan University about my blog post titled, “Learning about Physical Design outside of National Taiwan University.”

As of March 21, 2012, these are the most "active" universities on Quora:Assumptions and other considerations:Let us define "active" by university topic page follower count.We must assume that only a negligible number of people follow university topic pages without having attended those universities.These follower counts also include prospective students, incoming freshmen, alumni, faculty, staff, etc... So they're not a simple reading of "number of college students from X college with a Quora account." It's just an approximation.We should also consider that some universities have smaller student populations than others, so Caltech having 777 topic followers actually indicates relatively strong penetration, since their total student body size is 2231 (undergraduate + postgraduate). 35% of a campus on a website? Seems pretty good to me. Again, please keep in mind that out of 777, perhaps 100 are aspiring to go to Caltech, or 200 are alumni. These numbers are approximations.The list also doesn't take into account all graduate and professional schools. This is an important consideration, as many Quora users are either prospective applicants, current students, or alumni of these postgraduate institutions. On the other side of this coin, the data more closely reflects the similarity to Facebook's undergrad/college growth in early stages. ALSO: It's safe to assume that only a handful of people would list (follow) just their postgraduate level of education. Almost every person will also list (follow) their undergraduate institution as well, mitigating the problem quite a bit.This list is derived from the top 101 schools from the 2012 U.S. News and World Report National University Rankings.Interpretation and Analysis:Assuming little overlap, the total university population (or at least those associated / interested in these universities) on Quora, is: 68,979.So nearly ~70,000 Quora users are somehow associated with the Top 101 colleges in the US (either by interest or actual attendance). As an aside, I find this number to be weaker than expected. But then again, we just don't know exactly how many college students visit the site without signing up as users. That's a huge factor we must consider, especially if we contemplate a hypothetical scenario where Quora monetizes through advertising. Since they keep the site open to all (even non-users), they could still generate revenue through all the people viewing pages without signing up. If college kids keep citing Quora as the go-to source for information, that would be a win for Quora, despite these topic page follower counts being low.There doesn't seem to be a strong correlation between higher rankings and higher followers. You don't see the top 10 schools (by USNWR ranking) also loosely fit the top 10 most followed topic pages. In fact, the top 10 most followed range from schools ranked between 1-34.Geographically, a great chunk of the "most active" are from Boston, the SF Bay Area, New York, and Los Angeles. This seems to also correlate with education per capita stats we have from the census. That's a good stat to compare with since Quora has a core user-base of highly educated people. It would be interesting to see how the university metrics measure up with overall geographic metrics and see if anything pops out there. In the absence of Quora providing any of this data, that would require a similar data mining approach of viewing the follower count for various cities.Stanford University is the "most active" by follower count, with ~8.5k followers. It's important to note that Quora is just a few blocks from the Stanford campus and is closely intertwined with the overall community. This begs the question: is the Stanford follower count high because Quora is nearby or because people that go to, went to, or are interested in Stanford comprise a core part of the Quora user base? If we look at the next most active school (Harvard), we see a similarly high count of ~5.3k followers. Remember, Harvard is 3,000 miles away on a different coast (and it's still got that many followers). This suggests that while Stanford's numbers might be inflated due partially to Quora's physical proximity, it's because there's an association based on these schools' student body preferences (and they prefer sites like Quora). The case of MIT at #3 further proves this point.There's more we could do with this data but this is what I'm putting up for now. Also: there's no easy way to get an accurate data set of college attendance, just these topic page follower numbers, so we should always temper our enthusiasm about these results given the condition of the data set.Overall, I think this is an important metric to follow. College students have historically always been eager to adopt technology and information tools. If they're numbers are lagging on the site, it's probably not a good sign.There is however a different way to view the Quora and higher education intersection. If we draw parallels to Facebook and their growth strategy, we'd have to focus on Quora as a social network and track user engagement. If we focus on Quora's content, however, then what we're really looking at is how the product evolves the concept of a knowledge repository beyond the traditional library/university paradigm (and the Internet in general). In that case, college-associated engagement wouldn't be as relevant.Parting note: if you spot any trends, shortcomings, or other suggestions, please point them out in the comments.If you've developed a scraper to mine data more easily, let me know. There's lots more work to be done ascertaining growth and the market opportunity for this company.For reference:Here's the master list I used with Quora links to university topic pages preserved so going back to update can be done easily. This list is also a way to view the data set sorted by USNWR ranking from highest to lowest [as of 2012-03-21]:Harvard University - 5322 followersPrinceton University - 1470 followersYale University - 1585 followersColumbia University - 1948 followersCalifornia Institute of Technology - 777 followersMassachusetts Institute of Technology - 3807 followersStanford University - 8543 followersUniversity of Chicago - 930 followersUniversity of Pennsylvania - 1372 followersDuke University - 1090 followersDartmouth College - 768 followersNorthwestern University - 899 followersJohns Hopkins University - 544 followersWashington University in St. Louis - 467 followersBrown University - 664 followersCornell University - 1365 followersRice University - 141 followersVanderbilt University - 278 followersUniversity of Notre Dame - 304 followersEmory University - 298 followersUniversity of California, Berkeley - 3267 followersGeorgetown University - 353 followersCarnegie-Mellon University - 2176 followersUniversity of Southern California - 1635 followersUniversity of California, Los Angeles - 1749 followersUniversity of Virginia - 480 followersWake Forest University - 168 followersUniversity of Michigan (Ann Arbor) - 1303 followersTufts University - 341 followersUniversity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill - 612 followersBoston College - 394 followersBrandeis University - 96 followersThe College of William & Mary - 39 followersNew York University - 2142 followersUniversity of Rochester - 187 followersGeorgia Institute of Technology - 936 followersUniversity of California, San Diego - 979 followersCase Western Reserve University - 83 followersLehigh University - 85 followersUniversity of California, Davis - 693 followersUniversity of Miami - 241 followersUniversity of California, Santa Barbara - 934 followersUniversity of Washington - 760 followersUniversity of Wisconsin - Madison - 245 followersPennsylvania State University - 344 followersUniversity of California, Irvine - 622 followersUniversity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign - 497 followersThe University of Texas at Austin - 799 followersYeshiva University - 40 followersThe George Washington University - 582 followersRensselaer Polytechnic Institute - 280 followersTulane University - 148 followersBoston University - 614 followersFordham University - 123 followersThe Ohio State University - 576 followersPepperdine University - 100 followersUniversity of Maryland, College Park - 357 followersTexas A&M University (TAMU) - 506 followersThe University of Connecticut - 105 followersUniversity of Florida - 921 followersUniversity of Pittsburgh - 249 followersNortheastern University - 444 followersPurdue University - 482 followersSouthern Methodist University - 83 followersSyracuse University - 543 followersUniversity of Georgia - 215 followersWorcester Polytechnic - 104 followersClemson University - 158 followersRutgers University - 394 followersUniversity of Minnesota - Twin Cities - 40 followersBrigham Young University - 615 followersMichigan State University - 592 followersUniversity of Iowa - 421 followersVirginia Tech - 593 followersBaylor University - 160 followersColorado School of Mines - 29 followersIndiana University- 732 followersUniversity of Alabama - 162 followersUniversity of California, Santa Cruz - 512 followersUniversity of Delaware - 132 followersUniversity of Tulsa - 35 followersAmerican University- 266 followersAuburn University - 293 followersMarquette University - 162 followersSUNY ESF - N/AUniversity of Denver - 105 followersUniversity of Vermont - 163 followersDrexel University - 156 followersStevens Institute of Technology Placement - 49 followersBinghamton University (SUNY) - 82 followersMiami University - 241 followersSaint Louis University - 9 followersUniversity of Missouri-Columbia - 185 followersClark University - 30 followersUniversity of Colorado Boulder - 255 followersUniversity of Massachusetts, Amherst - 265 followersIowa State University - 114 followersTexas Christian University - 34 followersUniversity of California, Riverside - 279 followersUniversity of San Diego - 59 followersFlorida State University - 453 followers

I am an integrated BS-MS student from IISER Kolkata (2018) majoring in Chemistry.In our batch there are 40 students with Chemistry major. At least 17 of them have already received offers from reputed US universities for pursuing PhD.The list of US universities include Pennsylvania State University, John's Hopkins University, University of California Irvine, University of Wisconsin Madison, University of Massachusetts Amherst (famous for polymer chemistry), Iowa State University, University of Arizona etc.Two of the students have already received offer from Europe (University of Bonn at Germany and EPFL Switzerland). At least one person I know of has an offer from Canada (University of British Columbia). As the application process of European and Canadian universities is still in progress these numbers are going to increase significantly in a few more days.A large fraction of the rest of the students have not applied for PhD this year and they will continue their research project one more year. In this way they can increase their research experience and also publish one or two papers which may help them to get an offer from better university in USA or Europe.Other than these three major chunk of students there are a few who are planning to do their PhD in Indian Universities and the rest are preparing for PSC, UPSC and other exams for Government Jobs or applying for R&D jobs in private companies. Two of us have already completed six months internship in Unilever. This experience is supposed to help them in securing industry jobs.This is the picture of only the Chemistry department of IISER Kolkata of one batch (passing out in 2018). Other departments will also have similar picture. For example Physics students will join Princeton University, Boston University, University of Maryland College Park, University of Central Florida etc.