Lund University

Lund University (Swedish: Lunds universitet) is one of Europe's most prestigious universities and Scandinavia's largest institutions for education and research, consistently ranked among the world's top 100 universities. The university, located in the city of Lund in the province of Scania, Sweden, traces its roots back to 1425, when a Franciscan studium generale was founded in Lund next to the Lund Cathedral, arguably making it the oldest institution of higher education in Scandinavia followed by studium generales in Uppsala in 1477 and Copenhagen in 1479. The current university was however not founded until 1666 after Sweden had won Scania in the 1658 peace agreement with Denmark.

Lund University has eight faculties, with additional campuses in the cities of Malmö and Helsingborg, with 47,000 students in more than 280 different programmes and around 2,250 separate courses. The University has some 680 partner universities in over 50 countries and it belongs to the League of European Research Universities as well as the global Universitas 21 network.

Two major facilities for materials research are currently under construction in Lund: MAX IV, which will be a world-leading synchrotron radiation laboratory and European Spallation Source (ESS), a European facility that will be home to the world’s most powerful neutron source.

The university traditionally centers on the Lundagård park adjacent to the Lund Cathedral, with various departments spread in different locations in town, but mostly concentrated in a belt stretching north from the park connecting to the university hospital area and continuing out to the northeastern periphery of the town, where one finds the large campus of the Faculty of Engineering.