University of Zurich

The University of Zurich (UZH) is Switzerland's largest university, with around 28,000 students enrolled. UZH was Europe's first university to be established by a democratic political system rather than a monarchy or church (1883). The university has four locations and is made up of seven faculties. UZH offers a wide variety of Bachelor's, Master's, and Ph.D. programs and covers around one hundred different subjects.

UZH is a research university. The university has been a member of the Universitas 21 (U21) network, a global network of twenty-seven research universities, in addition to the League of European Research Universities (LERU). They make research available to the public through access to their museums and libraries. The work of UZH scholars, including Albert Einstien, Erwin Schrödinger, Paul Karrer, and Rolf Zinkernagel, has been recognized with twelve Nobel Prizes.

The University of Zurich was ranked 56th in the 2020 Academic Ranking of World Universities and within Europe, UZH is in 16th place. Michael Schaepman is currently the President at UZH.

The university was founded in 1833 as the "Universitas Turicensis." This was a result of The Canton of Zurich combining its existing colleges of theology, jurisprudence, and medicine, along with the supplemental faculty of arts. It was founded in hopes of becoming a national Swiss university. Johann Caspar von Orelli, a key person in the founding of OZH, wrote: "We founded the Zurich institution as a first step. But it can, it must become the university for the whole of Switzerland." While this never quite came to pass, the University did grow and expand its topics, and by its fiftieth anniversary the school had 463 students and ninety-one instructors. By 1905 it had over 1,000 students.

In 1912, the university was officially named the University of Zurich. Their first professor to receive a Nobel Prize was Albert Werner, in 1913. He would be followed by eleven other Nobel Prize winners. The university continued to grow and establish itself as a research university. By 2007 they had reached 10,000 students and began expanding their campus locations starting with the opening of their Irchel Campus in 1979 . In 1998 UZH became politically and legally autonomous. The university became a member of the League of European Research Universities (LERU) in 2006, and of the Universitas 21 (U21) network in 2017.