Technical University of Munich

The Technical University of Munich is a public technical university founded in 1868 in Munich, Germany. It grew from a nineteenth-century polytechnic into a university covering engineering, natural sciences, life sciences, medicine, and management, with major campuses in central Munich, Garching, and Weihenstephan and further sites in Heilbronn and Singapore. Its defining structure remains that of a technical university with a medical faculty attached.

TUM is organized into schools of engineering and design, computation, information and technology, natural sciences, life sciences, medicine and health, and management. University Hospital Klinikum rechts der Isar and the Garching physics and engineering campus are the main graduate research sites. Chair-based laboratories in robotics, energy, and protein science sit alongside those schools.

Enrollment is about 50,000 students, with more than 30 percent international, from a wide set of countries. Past faculty include Nobel laureates Ernst Otto Fischer in chemistry and Rudolf Mössbauer in physics. Alumni include engineers and scientists across German industry; Rudolf Diesel studied at the Munich polytechnic that became TUM.

Graduate study is built around consecutive master's degrees and the doctorate (Dr.-Ing. or Dr. rer. nat.) under a chair supervisor, with structured graduate schools in some fields. The year follows the German winter and summer semester. Doctoral candidates are often paid as scientific staff. Students divide time between Munich's urban campuses and the Garching research site north of the city.

In the Grad School Navigator directory, Technical University of Munich lists 17 graduate programs across 9 subjects: 13 master's programs and 4 doctoral programs, with the widest choice in mathematics, biology and computer science. Technical University of Munich holds rank 71 in the GSN Overall University Ranking.