Queen's ranks 6th globally and 1st in Canada in the 2025 Times Higher Education Impact Rankings
KINGSTON, ON, June 17, 2025 /CNW/ - Queen's University has once again earned a place among the top universities in the world for its contributions to advancing the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In the 2025 Times Higher Education (THE) Impact Rankings, Queen's ranks 6th globally out of more than 2,500 institutions from 130 countries, and is the top-ranked Canadian university.
This marks the fifth straight year that Queen's has placed in the global top 10 – a milestone unmatched by any other Canadian institution since the rankings began in 2019.
"Progress toward the UN's Sustainable Development Goals depends on collaboration across every part of the university. This recognition reflects the dedication of faculty, staff, students, and partners who are finding practical and creative ways to contribute. Their work continues to expand what is possible," says Queen's Principal and Vice-Chancellor Patrick Deane.
Now in its seventh year, the THE Impact Rankings evaluate how universities are performing against the UN's 17 SDGs, which represent a universal call to action to end poverty, protect the planet, and ensure peace and prosperity for all.
Sustained leadership across the SDGsThe university earned global top 10 placements in five categories, highlighting research, teaching and outreach strengths in areas such as food security, urban development, water sustainability, biodiversity, and global justice:
1st in the world for SDG 2: Zero Hunger
2nd in the world for SDG 14: Life Below Water
2nd in the world for SDG 16: Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions
4th in the world for SDG 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities
6th in the world for SDG 15: Life on Land
Collaborative impactThe Impact Rankings assess universities using a blend of qualitative and quantitative metrics, including research outputs, teaching practices, partnerships, and community-based initiatives. Queen's leadership in the rankings is supported by long-standing research priorities in sustainability, equity, health, and technological innovation – including work in green supercomputing, materials science, and clean energy.
Ongoing commitment"Participating in the Impact Rankings has helped Queen's articulate and expand the ways we contribute to the global common good," says Principal Deane. "This rankings recognition is not just about where we place, but also about highlighting and expanding the work being done across our university community to support people and the planet, and solve some of our most pressing challenges."
Read the full article on the Times Higher Education Impact Rankings and Queen's performance. About Queen's UniversityFounded in 1841, Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada is a leading research-intensive institution with more than 31,000 students and 5,000 faculty and staff. Queen's is known for its research in cancer, geoengineering, AI, data analytics, mental health, and physics (2015 Nobel Prize). Queen's fosters a diverse and inclusive community and is a destination for individuals who want to build a better future for people and the planet.
SOURCE Queen's University
View original content to download multimedia: http://www.newswire.ca/en/releases/archive/June2025/17/c1322.html
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
6 hours ago
- Yahoo
Tick population booming in N.B. after successive mild winters, expert says
With the prospect of a warm summer ahead, Mount Allison University biologist Vett Lloyd warns New Brunswickers to protect themselves from ticks, who have been on the rise over the past couple of years. Lloyd has been studying ticks for more than 10 years and said the tick population has become unprecedentedly high this season. "We had two mild winters in a row and that means that instead of dying off during the winter, the ticks were able to sleep it out under the snow and under the soil," said Lloyd. "Anytime an adult female gets a good blood meal, she can produce 2,000 to 3,000 little baby ticks, so there are a lot of ticks now." Ticks are parasites that suck blood to create more ticks. They often feed on the blood of wild animals that carry diseases, such as Lyme disease, and bacteria that can be transmitted to humans and pets if they get bit. These diseases are called zoonotic illnesses, some of which can be fatal if left untreated. Lloyd said researchers have seen an increase in the number of ticks in the southern half of the province, along the coast. They're even starting to appear increasingly far north, carried by migratory birds and wild animals like coyotes, foxes and deer. These ticks are also carrying new diseases, such as anaplasmosis and babesiosis, which can be fatal to humans more rapidly than Lyme disease, Lloyd said. She said government doesn't currently keep track of the tick population, so researchers use community reports and targeted tick sweeps to determine how the parasite is spreading. To contribute to community reports, individuals can slowly drag a fleece blanket or an old towel over vegetation and grass in their backyard or a local park for a few minutes. If a small, black, multi-legged speck is observed, it's probably a tick. These reports can be submitted to a website created by researchers at Bishop's University and funded by the Public Health Agency of Canada. The site also includes other resources, including a map of the country that indicates high-incidence tick areas in red. Besides using etick, Lloyd recommends using bug spray — preferably ones that say they also work on ticks. Lloyd said these sprays have probably been tested on ticks, making them more efficient to repel them than regular bug spray. She also recommends people cover their legs with long pants when outdoors. However, if this is not feasible due to summer heat, she stressed the importance of frequent tick checks during walks and after coming back from being outside. "Either in the middle of the hike, look at your own legs, look at your clothing, catch the ticks that are walking on you and get them off while they are still walking. They are not a risk," she said. "Once they stick their head into you and start sucking your blood, they are a risk, so get them off early." To make sure ticks are not latched on, Lloyd also advised people to take a shower after their walks or just take their clothes off and do a thorough tick check with the help of a mirror or someone else. In the young stages, ticks can be about the size of poppy seed, while adults can be around the size of a sesame seed, so Lloyd encourages people to look for "freckle-sized" objects. To protect pets from ticks, Lloyd said most anti-flea products will also have anti-tick medication. She recommends pet owners talk to their veterinarian and get medication prescribed to prevent the spread of diseases in their households. If you were bitten by a tick and didn't realize it for a couple of hours, Lloyd said to not panic. She said the first step to treat a tick bite is to remove it right away. "The nice thing about ticks is that they don't go fast, so it's not an emergency in the sense of gushing blood or someone can't breath," she said. Lloyd said there are various tick removal tools if people are squeamish about touching ticks, but they can easily remove them with tweezers or their hands if they have nothing available in their homes. She said the best thing to do to make sure the tick didn't give you a disease is to determine what type of tick it is. She recommended people submit the picture of the tick in etick, where researchers will identify it. People can also get their tick tested for diseases if they mail it to Geneticks, a private company in Canada that specializes in tick testing. There is a fee to get ticks tested by Geneticks, and according to Lloyd, besides Geneticks, there's only a few parts in the country where individuals can go to get ticks tested through the health-care system. Lloyd said many pharmacies can prescribe a single dose of antibiotics to people bitten by ticks, without cost, and even without a family doctor. In 2023, pharmacists became publicly funded to assess and prescribe for seven illnesses and conditions, including Lyme disease prevention after a high-risk tick bite. Lloyd said people only need to bring the tick in a bag, or take a picture of it, and show it to the pharmacist, who would then administer the antibiotic doxycycline depending on the severity of the case. "It works if you catch the tick when it just started to feed, so that's why it's really important to do a tick check the same day you've been exposed," said Lloyd. Lloyd said that if left unchecked, a tick can feed on an individual's blood for about a week, increasing their chances to infect its host with the diseases it's carrying. Based on this year's survey results regarding early tick bite treatment outcomes, Lloyd said pharmacy treatment has proven quite accessible. Anne Marie Picone, the executive director of the New Brunswick Pharmacist Association, agrees with Lloyd. She said the provision of the single-dose treatment has helped reduce the backlog of patients going to the urgent care clinics due to tick bites. "Anecdotal evidence from colleagues, from pharmacists that are members, are telling us that especially in certain areas, we are seeing increases in people coming in and asking for the service," she said. Picone explained that with the treatment being government funded, customers can come into most pharmacies in New Brunswick and get two paid-for tick assessments per year. She said pharmacists will mostly treat those who have been bitten within 72 hours because, depending on their symptoms and complexity of the case, they might need to be referred to a doctor. Additionally, Picone recommended people to reach out to their pharmacies first to make sure they have time to assess them. According to Lloyd's survey, 10 to 30 per cent of those who took the single-dose treatment can still get Lyme disease, however she believes having access to the treatment is still pivotal for the prevention of tick-caused diseases. "Three times fewer people developed Lyme disease if they got the early treatment than if they didn't," she said. Lloyd doesn't want to deter people from enjoying outdoor activities, but she hopes they will be more cautious about ticks and the diseases they carry, especially given the emergence of newer zoonotic tick-borne illnesses. "I always encourage people to go out, but then just be careful," she said. "Take just the same way you put sunscreen to not get a sunburn, put bug spray and do a tick check afterwards just to be safe."
Yahoo
14 hours ago
- Yahoo
Obscure rock formation in Canada may contain the world's oldest minerals
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. An obscure rock formation on the eastern shore of Canada's Hudson Bay may contain the oldest known rocks on Earth, a new study claims. The analysis dated the site's streaky gray rocks, part of an outcrop called the Nuvvuagittuq Greenstone Belt, to 4.16 billion years ago — meaning they're remnants from our 4.57 billion-year-old planet's earliest crust. The dating, performed by two methods that used the decay of radioactive isotopes (versions of elements) to measure the age of ancient magma trapped inside the rocks, significantly bolsters a controversial past study by the same scientists. If their findings, published June 26 in the journal Science, stand up, they could offer a unique window into our planet's ancient history and the geochemical stage where life emerged. "The volcanic rocks have to be at least 4.16 billion years old or older; I would argue that the best age for them is 4.3 billion years old," study co-author Jonathan O'Neil, a professor of environmental science at the University of Ottawa, told Live Science. "No known rocks are older." Earth began as a ball of red-hot lava. It slowly cooled over its first 600 million years, known as the Hadean eon, when pockets of solid rock started to form. This was a tumultuous time for our young planet, which was repeatedly pummeled by asteroids and even sustained a cataclysmic blow from the protoplanet Theia, which tore off a chunk of Earth to form our moon. Related: Did plate tectonics give rise to life? Groundbreaking new research could crack Earth's deepest mystery Then, as early as 3.8 billion years ago, Earth's surface splintered into tectonic plates, which dived beneath each other to be recycled into Earth's interior or to build up vast mountain ranges or trenches. This subduction means that many of the rocks on our planet's surface have long been chemically altered by intense heat and pressure. Yet some regions are far enough from tectonic plate boundaries to contain rocks that have remained unchanged for billions of years. One of these is in northeastern Canada, and its most ancient part is the Nuvvuagittuq Greenstone Belt (NGB). Scientists agree that this outcrop is at least 3.8 billion years old. Then, in 2008, O'Neil and his colleagues published a study suggesting that the NGB was 4.3 billion years old — which would mean it contained the oldest rocks in the world. But other geologists objected, suggesting there were flaws in the researchers' methods. Old rocks are typically dated using a mineral called zircon, which is chemically stable over billions of years. The volcanic rocks in the NGB, however, don't contain zircon, which forced the scientists to measure the rocks' age by the decay of the element samarium into neodymium. Yet trouble lurked within this new method. Samarium can decay into neodymium through two pathways (samarium-146 into neodymium-142, or samarium-147 into neodymium-143), creating two isotopic clocks with different decay speeds. The first decay path leads to a half-life — the period of time required for half the original element to remain — of about 96 million years, while the second pathway has a half-life spanning trillions of years. This means that the two decay pathways produced wildly different estimates for the ages of the rocks. This is because with the longer-lived clock ticking to the present day, it is especially susceptible to tectonic events muddling its isotopes part way through the decay process. "Any 'cooking' of the rocks or metamorphism after 4 billion years ago won't really affect that short-lived clock but can reset the long-lived clock and cause the age difference between these two systems," O'Neil said. RELATED STORIES —Hidden 36 million-year-long cycles may fuel biodiversity on Earth, ancient rocks reveal —Zealandia, Earth's hidden continent, was torn from supercontinent Gondwana in flood of fire 100 million years ago —Is Africa splitting in two? To sidestep this issue, the team went back to the formations to search for sections where magma from Earth's mantle, or middle layer, intruded into the planet's primordial crust. Because these intrusions had to be younger than the rock they seeped into, they could be used as a minimum age. The new analysis revealed that within these sections of the NGB, both samarium to neodymium decays offered the same age: 4.16 billion years. If further research does confirm that the rocks are as old as O'Neil's team believes, they could offer vital insight into how life emerged on our planet and potentially beyond it. "Some rocks from the Nuvvuagittuq Greenstone Belt were formed by precipitation from seawater, and these can help understand the composition of our first oceans, their temperature, perhaps the atmosphere and also could host the oldest traces of life on Earth," O'Neil said. "Understanding the environment where life could have started on our planet also helps in our quest to find traces of life elsewhere, such as Mars.'
Yahoo
a day ago
- Yahoo
Pitcher this: MUN herbarium home to thousands of N.L. botanicals
In a room full of tall metal cabinets, Julissa Roncal carefully flicks through stacks of manila folders. They're filled with pages of expertly pressed and dried plant specimens. "See the little berries there? How do you dry a fleshy fruit and put it on a paper, completely dry?" she said, pulling out a page with a flat, dry branch with berries on it. They're perfectly preserved and dated 1966. "It does take a lot of time, effort and art to put those fleshy fruits on a dried specimen that will last for decades." Roncal is the curator of the Memorial University Agnes Marion Ayre Herbarium. The collection has about 100,000 specimens tucked in a small office on Mount Scio Road. "They are basically cataloged or distributed following a particular order that represents the classification," she explained. "Each specimen is labelled with the year it was collected, the person who collected it, and where it was found." She said about 80 to 90 per cent of the specimens are from Newfoundland and Labrador, and the rest are from other parts of the world. The collection, Roncal said, is not only important for research and history, but because it belongs to the people of the province. "This is a specimen of the Newfoundland provincial flower," she said, pulling out a page with a dried pitcher plant adhered to it, titled Carbonear, 1945. For decades, researchers and botanists have dried, pressed, and preserved specimens from three main categories: algae, mosses and vascular plants. The collection is used to train biology students at MUN, who learn about databases, manipulating large data sets, and get experience in botany and biology in systematics, taxonomy and species distribution. "We can extract DNA, for example, from these specimens for genomics research," Roncal said. And depending on the research, the collection can also aid in climatological research. "We can also track whether these species have changed their flowering times or their physiologies throughout time," she said. "For example, we can detect whether a particular species is flowering sooner or later and correlate it with climate change, so that information can be observed or rescued from the information that is hosted or housed here." Roncal said there are about sixteen thousand specimens digitized and accessible to the public. Work at the herbarium started years before Roncal's tenure as curator. She describes the herbarium's namesake — Agnes Marion Ayre — as an influential figure. "She was a suffragist, she fought for women's rights, for voting. So she's definitely an inspiration beyond botany for all of us," she said. Ayre was an amateur botanist, and collected and preserved some of the specimens in the collection. Roncal said those contributions were the starting point. "So it is the result of decades of botanical exploration and accumulation of these specimens," she said. But Ayre didn't just catalogue plant species she found, she also painted them with watercolours while in the field. There are about two thousand of Ayre's paintings between the Centre for Newfoundland Studies and the herbarium. It's a process that Roncal said added more detail than a typical press would. "Painting allows you to devote time to deep, thorough observation of the plant that you have in front of you," Roncal said, looking at a painting from the 1920s. "So that's why the combination of both is ideal to really get to know what species and identify with confidence what you're looking at," she said. "And putting a name to what you're looking at." Roncal said her team is working on digitizing the rest of the collection to make it more accessible. Download our to sign up for push alerts for CBC Newfoundland and Labrador. Sign up for our . Click .
