Three Nobel Prize laurates have taught at the university, Leo Esaki, Hideki Shirakawa and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga.

In April 2024, the university announced that it would open its first overseas campus, housing the School of Transdisciplinary Science and Design, in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, starting in September.

This focus is reflected by the university's location in the heart of Tsukuba Science City, alongside over 300 other research institutions.

[9] It has established interdisciplinary PhD programs in both Human Biology and Empowerment Informatics and the International Institute for Integrative Sleep Medicine, which were created through the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology's competitive funding projects.

Its Graduate School of Life and Environmental Sciences is represented on the national Coordinating Committee for Earthquake Prediction.

The university is a member of AIMS program, which is to promote regional student mobility among the ASEAN and participated countries including Japan.

As of August 2015, the university has over 300 international inter-university agreements[16] and 13 overseas offices in 12 countries, located in Brazil, China, Germany, France, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Tunisia, Taiwan, United States, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam.

Arudou notes that in 1985 the university decided to terminate the contracts of foreign teaching staff resulting in litigation being brought against the institution.

[46] An account of the university's poor treatment of and breaking of contractual obligations with foreign staff is also included in Ivan Hall's Cartels of the Mind.

[47] On 12 July 1991, the university became the site of a murder when the Japanese translator of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, Hitoshi Igarashi, was killed in the context of the fatwas initiated by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini following the book's publication.

Under Nagata's leadership the university became the first institution of higher education to receive large scale funding from the Ministry of Defense in December 2019.

[51] The university met controversy again in 2020 when Nagata was re-elected as its president despite losing the faculty's ballot by almost two-thirds of the vote.

[54] Critics have suggested that the university is attempting to circumvent its short comings in research which negatively affects its ranking by falsifying data.