Quacquarelli Symonds has released its annual World University Rankings for the year 2019 and Pakistan Institute of Engineering and Applied Sciences (PIEAS) has overthrown National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST), becoming the number one university in Pakistan.

QS World University Rankings, an annual publication of university rankings, recently released its 15th edition of world university rankings for 2019. For the seventh consecutive time, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has topped the charts out of the 1,000 universities evaluated from 85 different countries.

However, in Pakistan, PIEAS has taken the top spot, which was previously held by NUST, and has marked itself as the top ranked university in the country by the QS World University Rankings 2019.

PIEAS, which has not been listed in the past in these rankings, has acquired 397th spot out of 100. NUST went down a bit further to having the 417th position, improving itself from last year’s 431-440 spot.

QS cites PIEAS as, “[The varsity] is one of the most reputed universities of Pakistan. Comparing with other universities in Pakistan, PIEAS has the highest proportion of PhD’s in its full?time faculty.”

It continued, “PIEAS has excellent experimental and computational facilities for conducting research and development projects in cutting edge technologies. PIEAS is one of the most research-intensive universities of Pakistan.”

Other Pakistani universities included in the list is Quaid-e-Azam University ranked in between 551-560, improving from last year’s 651-700. Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) was ranked between 701-750, whereas, COMSATS was ranked between 751-800. UET Lahore and University of Punjab were both ranked at the same spot of between 801-1000.

Moreover, four universities from USA held the first four spots including MIT, Stanford University, Harvard University and California Institute of Technology respectively. The top 10 spots were occupied by universities from USA and UK with the exception of Switzerland’s ETH Zurich that claimed the 7th rank.