Founded in 1743, Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangan-Nuremberg (FAU) is a public research university based in Bavaria, southeast Germany. It is the second largest state university in the region and among the ten largest in the country overall.
Home to around 40,000 students, including more than 4,000 from overseas, it comprises five faculties – Humanities, Social Sciences and Theology, Business, Economics and Law, Medicine, Sciences, and Engineering – as well as 23 departments, 30 clinical departments and 19 autonomous departments.
Around 250 degree programmes are available at FAU, including 78 undergraduate programmes, 88 masters, and 90 staatsexamen (state examinations). The university is renowned for its interdisciplinary approach.
The university’s main research areas are new materials, optics and optical technology, molecular life sciences and medicine, health technology, electronics, information and communication, energy, environment and climate, language, culture and region, law and economics.
It has two main sites, one located in the city of Erlangen and the other in Nuremberg.
In receipt of €180 million in third-party funding, FAU is one of the best funding universities in Germany. It boasts approximately 500 links with other universities and higher education institutes around the world and was the first German university to establish a branch campus in Busan, South Korea.
FAU has benefited from the German government’s Excellence Initiative – resulting in the Graduate School in Advanced Optical Technologies and the Cluster of Excellence ‘Engineering of Advanced Materials’ being located at the university.
Among the university’s alumni is the physicist Hans Geiger, co-inventor of the Geiger counter, as well as three Nobel Laureates.
