In the most recent QS ranking, ETH Zurich remains the top university in continental Europe, trailing only six others in the US (MIT 1st, Harvard 4th, Stanford 6th) and the UK (Imperial – 2nd, Oxford 3rd, Cambridge 5th). ETH Zurich came 7th in the previous ranking.
In addition to ranking 7th overall, ETH Zurich was ranked number one for a number of subjects including Earth and Marine Sciences, Geology and Geophysics. It also ranked in the top 10 across a significant number of other subjects. Established in 1855 as the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School, ETHZ can count 22 Nobel laureates, 2 Fields Medalists, 3 Pritzker Prize winners, and 1 Turing Award winner as alumni, including the great Albert Einstein himself.
EPF Lausanne, the French-speaking sibling to ETH Zurich, rose 10 places from a ranking of 36th to 26th. At a subject level EPFL made it into the top 10 in a number of fields including Electrical and Electronic Engineering (7th), Chemistry (9th), Chemical Engineering (10th), Engineering and Technology (10th) and Materials Science (10th). EPFL was founded as a small university in 1853. In 1969 it officially became Switzerland’s second federal university alongside ETHZ, but only really took off in 1978 when its new campus opened on its current site on the outskirts of Lausanne. Today it is one of only a few universities to run a nuclear reactor, a Gene/Q Supercomputer, and have P3 bio-hazard facilities.
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