The University of Cambridge has been named the top UK university for attracting and educating international students who go on to win Nobel Prizes, research conducted by the British Council has shown.

The British Council study, released in the week that the Nobel Institute announces this year’s award-winners, found that over a third of Nobel Prize winners were educated in the UK.

In the 114 years since the award began, 860 individuals have received a Nobel Prize. Nearly two-fifths have spent time at British universities.

The 50 prizewinners who studied in the UK compares favourably with the United States and Germany, who had 37 and 23 Nobel Laureates respectively.

17 of the UK-educated Laureates received their prizes for physiology and medicine, eight won for physics, eight for chemistry, seven for economics, and five each for literature and peace.

The University of Cambridge topped the charts of British institutions which had awarded degrees to those who would go on to win Nobel Prizes, with 18 Laureates to its name.

The University of Oxford has 11 Laureates and the London School of Economics and Political Science has five. The most recent Cambridge-educated Nobel Laureate is Michael Levitt, a biophysicist who is currently professor of structural biology at Stanford University.

Levitt, who studied for his PhD at Cambridge in the 1970s, was awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his role in the “development of multi scale models for complex chemical systems”.

Past international Cambridge alumi and teaching staff who went on to win Nobel Prizes include economists Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen, chemists Roger Y. Tsien and Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, and poet and playwright Wole Soyinka.

Describing these achievements, Jo Beall, the British Council’s Director of Education and Society, claimed that Britain’s “global reputation for excellence” attracts overseas students.

She added that “The British Council celebrates UK alumni and, without question, Nobel Laureates have changed the world. Their journeys would have begun with their studies at university, so it’s wonderful to discover that, for Nobel Laureates who went abroad to pursue their education, more studied in the UK than anywhere else.”