ETH Zurich

ETH Zurich, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, is a public science and technology university run by the Swiss Confederation. The federal government founded it in 1855 as the Eidgenössisches Polytechnikum. It belongs to the ETH Domain along with EPFL in Lausanne and four federal research institutes, including the Paul Scherrer Institute. Its two main sites are the Zentrum campus in central Zurich and the Hönggerberg campus on the city's edge.

ETH is organized into 16 departments that cover architecture, civil, mechanical, electrical and process engineering, computer science, mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, earth and environmental sciences, health sciences, and management and social sciences. It is known for physics, computer science, robotics, geomatics and architecture. Major units include the ETH AI Center, the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre in Lugano, which ETH runs, and the Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering in Basel.

ETH enrolls about 26,000 students, including roughly 4,500 doctoral candidates. More than a third of students are international, and most doctoral candidates come from outside Switzerland. More than 20 Nobel laureates have been associated with ETH. Alumni include Albert Einstein, mathematician John von Neumann and physicist Wilhelm Röntgen.

Bachelor's programs are taught mainly in German, while most master's programs are taught in English. They run 1.5 to 2 years at 90 to 120 ECTS credits. The Excellence Scholarship and Opportunity Programme funds selected master's students. Doctoral candidates are employed by their professor's group on a salaried contract and are supervised within that group rather than through a large coursework program. The academic year has autumn and spring semesters. Zurich is a compact, high-cost city with efficient public transport and quick rail links across Europe.

In the Grad School Navigator directory, ETH Zurich lists 67 graduate programs across 27 subjects: 40 master's programs and 27 doctoral programs, with the widest choice in biology, computer science and physics. ETH Zurich holds rank 14 in the GSN Overall University Ranking.