Human Sciences

Human sciences is an integrative discipline that takes the human being as its subject and draws on biology, anthropology, psychology, sociology, and the environmental sciences to understand what it means to be human, in all its biological, social, and cultural complexity. It is a degree that refuses the artificial separation of the natural sciences from the human sciences, asking instead how genetic inheritance, ecological context, cultural practice, and social organisation interact to produce the diversity of human experience we observe across time and space. The questions it addresses are fundamental: how did humans evolve, how do we develop across our lifetimes, how do we build societies, and how are our bodies and minds shaped by the environments we inhabit?

At University College London, this three-year full-time programme benefits from UCL's extraordinary breadth of expertise, drawing on researchers across anthropology, evolutionary biology, psychology, epidemiology, and the social sciences to create a genuinely integrated programme. You will study human evolution and genetics, human ecology, population biology, developmental psychology, social anthropology, and the biological basis of human behaviour, developing both quantitative and qualitative research skills alongside a wide-ranging conceptual framework. UCL is a natural home for this interdisciplinary approach, with research of international distinction across all the disciplines the programme draws on.

A typical entry tariff of 168 points reflects the programme's competitive and demanding nature.

Human sciences graduates are valued for their unusual combination of scientific rigour and social and cultural breadth. Careers span public health, medicine (via graduate entry), epidemiology and health research, international development, policy, anthropology, and the biological sciences. Many graduates continue to postgraduate study in a specific human sciences discipline, allowing them to develop specialist expertise in evolution, health, society, or culture.

The degree's interdisciplinary character means graduates are genuinely versatile, capable of working across traditional disciplinary boundaries in ways that most narrowly trained graduates cannot.