UK meaning in Academic & Science ?

The University of Kentucky (UK, UKY, or U of K) is a public land-grant research university in Lexington, Kentucky. Founded in 1865 by John Bryan Bowman as the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Kentucky, the university is one of the state's two land-grant universities (the other being Kentucky State University) and the institution with the highest enrollment in the state, with 30,545 students as of fall 2019.

The institution comprises 16 colleges, a graduate school, 93 undergraduate programs, 99 master programs, 66 doctoral programs, and four professional programs. It is classified among "R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity". According to the National Science Foundation, Kentucky spent $393 million on research and development in 2018, ranking it 63rd in the nation.

The University of Kentucky has fifteen libraries on campus. The largest is the William T. Young Library, a federal depository, hosting subjects related to social sciences, humanities, and life sciences collections. Since 1997, the university has focused expenditures increasingly on research, following a compact formed by the Kentucky General Assembly. The directive mandated that the university become a Top 20 public research institution, in terms of an overall ranking, to be determined by the university itself, by the year 2020.