The University of Manchester was created by bringing together The Victoria University of Manchester and UMIST, two of Britain's most distinguished universities, in 2004. Around 4,300 academic and research staff teach more than 28,000 undergraduate and more than 11,000 postgraduate students across 400 degree programmes. The University hosts arguably the largest bioinformatics research group outside the EBI, with strong research programmes in molecular and genome evolution, comparative and organismal biology, computational biology, and structural and functional systems.