University of Zürich

The University of Zurich, Switzerland (UZH), founded in 1833, leads Switzerland's institutions of higher education in several ways: With nearly 7600 employees, among them 4490 lecturers and 512 professors, and with over 25,000 students (3 392 graduates a year) it is by far the largest university in Switzerland. With its 160 specialist institutes, it offers the widest educational spectrum of any single university in the country. It has a budget of around 1000 M CHF (750 M EUR) per year. The University of Zurich is a member of the League of European Research Universities (www.leru.org) and one of the leading basic research institutions in Europe. It is best known for its achievements in immunology, brain research and molecular biology. But the liberal arts, law and business administration, and computer sciences are other fields for which the university has become well known outside Switzerland during the last decades. Altogether 12 Nobel prize winners have taught at the University of Zurich (among them Erwin Schrödinger and Albert Einstein). In the «Academic Ranking of World Universities – 2009» of Jiao Tong University in Shanghai, the University of Zurich ranks on position 54 worldwide, and on position 13 in Europe.

Researchers, teachers and students at the University of Zurich profit from the excellent technical and scientific infrastructure that the Greater Zurich Area provides. Apart from the University's own institutions this includes the Federal Institute of Technology (“Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule”, ETH) with its library (one of the very largest technical libraries in Europe) and its annex institutes (such as the Paul Scherrer Institute), as well as private institutions of research such as the Google Zurich European Engineering Centre, Disney Research Zurich, and the IBM Research Institute in Rüschlikon near Zurich (with no fewer than four Nobel Prize winners within the last decade, two of them jointly with the University of Zurich).