The Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro is a Catholic pontifical university in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
It is the joint responsibility of the Catholic Archdiocese of São Sebastião do Rio de Janeiro and the Society of Jesus.
In 2016, PUC-Rio was ranked as the fifth best university in Latin America by Times Higher Education magazine
The University was created in 1941 by the Society of Jesus to emphasize humanistic values in the pursuit of knowledge. PUC-Rio has 12,000 undergraduate students, 2,500 graduate students, and 4,000 extension students. In 2009 it ranked first among 2,252 higher education institutions in Brazil on ENADE, a benchmark exercise run by the Brazilian Ministry of Education.
PUC-Rio has highly accredited faculties in Law, Engineering, Computer science, Psychology, Economics, Business, and International Relations.
It fosters cultural diversity in its student body. It has participated in exchange programs with Harvard, Notre Dame, UC Berkeley, UCLA, Brown University as well as European universities, with hundreds of students participating each year.
