Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences

The Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences, also known colloquially as UCI's School of ICS or simply Bren School, is an academic unit of University of California, Irvine (UCI), and the only dedicated school of computer science in the University of California system. Consisting of nearly three thousand students, faculty, and staff, the school maintains three buildings in the South-East artery of UCI's undergraduate campus, and maintains student body student body and research affiliations throughout UCI.

The school of ICS consists of three departments: Computer Science, Informatics, and Statistics. The combined groupings focus the school around the fields of computing and processing of information. The departments confer eight undergraduate, eleven masters, and seven doctoral degrees in total, with some degree programs cooperating with affiliated schools.

Beginning in 1968, three years after UCI's founding, the Department of Information and Computer Science was created as an independent department, not belonging to any school. In 2002, the 35-year-old department was elevated to the status of a school, and its faculty were partitioned into two departments, the Department of Computer Science and the Department of Informatics. The Department of Statistics, founded earlier in 2002, was included as a third department in the newly created school.

During 2004, the school received a $20 million anonymous donation. The donation was later revealed to be from Donald Bren, a wealthy real estate developer and head of the Irvine Company. The school was renamed in his honor. The donation is primarily being used to seek out and seed prestigious researchers.

The school of ICS is one of less than fifty independent computer science schools in the United States, and the only one in the University of California system.

The US News and World Report ranks Bren School as 29th in the United States for Computer Science as of 2016^[update], and 14th in public university programs. Among some ICS subareas, the school is ranked 4th in human-computer interaction, 9th in software engineering, and 8th in databases.

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