Since I have not yet a good brand, I have to look for well-known universities while trying to find the best-fit research group for my research topic. The following list contains a bunch of top schools I am trying to get into. I have to look for the schools located in North America and Europe to have a reasonable and safe number of choices, so I'll skip those schools which are in other parts of the world.
Top Universities Ranking in Materials Science >>
1. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
2. Stanford University
Top Universities Ranking in Materials Science >>
1. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
2. Stanford University
4. University of California - Berkley (UCB)
5. Harvard University
6. University of Cambridge
7. University of Oxford
10. Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Laussane (EPFL)
=11. Imperial College London
=11. Northwestern University
=13. Georgia Institute of Technology
=15. ETH Zurich - Swiss Federal Institute of Technology
17. California Institute of Technology (Caltech)
20. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
24. Delft University of Technology
=25. University of Texas at Austin
28. RWTH Aachen University
=31. Carnegie-Melon University
=31. The University of Manchester
33. Cornell Universıty
34. Universıty of Michigan
36. Pennsylvania State University
39. University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB)
40. Rice University
=42. University of Pennsylvania
44. KTH Royal Institute of Technology
46. McGill University
47. Purdue University
=48 Monash University
50. KU Leuven -- Belgium
==================== 51-100 band ==================================
Brown University -- US
Case Western Reserve University
Chalmers University of Technology
Columbia University
Institute Polytechnique de Grenoble -- France
KIT, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
McMaster University
North Carolina State University
The Ohio State University
Politecnico De Milano
Politecnico di Torino
Princeton University
Technical University of Denmark
Technische Universitat Berlin (TU Berlin)
Technische Universitat Dresden
Technical University of Munich
Texas A&M University
The University of Sheffield
Trinity College Dublin, The University of Dublin
UCL (University College London)
Friedrich-Alexander-Universitat Erlangen-Nürnberg
University of Birmingham
University of British Columbia
University of California, San Diego (UCSD)
University of Florida
University of Minnesota
University of Toronto
University of Washington
University of Waterloo
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
Yale University