University of Fribourg

Overview

University of Fribourg

University of Fribourg (Unifr) is a public research university in Fribourg, Switzerland. It traces its foundation in 1582 when the Collège Saint-Michel was established. The present-day university was created through an Act of the Swiss Canton of the Fribourg Parliament in 1889. It is the only bilingual institution of higher education in Switzerland, with all its courses offered in both German and French. Recognized as among the top global universities in the E.U, the university is known for its programs in physics, chemistry, and engineering.

University of Fribourg Key Statistics

The university comprises five faculties, namely, the Faculty of Economics & Social Sciences, Faculty of Humanities, Faculty of Natural Sciences, Faculty of Law, and the Faculty of Catholic Theology.

A non-campus university, Unifr’s buildings and facilities are spread throughout the city of Fribourg, including Misericorde, Perolles, Regina Mundi, and BCU Centrale, which houses its Main Library.

University of Fribourg's student population is approximately 10,000. It employs 1,150 administrative staff and 750 administrative staff.

The other University of Fribourg key statistics include its long list of notable alumni such as biochemist, inventor, and former President of Israel Chaim Weizmann, Archbishop of Milan Angelo Scola, and former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States Antonin Scalia.

University of Fribourg Research

Unifr is one of the top research institutions in the E.U., known for its notable scientific breakthroughs in various areas. Most of its research programs are funded by the European
European Research Council (ERC) Grants and the Swiss National Science Foundation. Its top fields of research are biology, physics, and computer science.

University of Fribourg research outputs have been published in prestigious journals like the Journal of High Energy Physics, Physical Review Letters, and bioRxiv. Its researchers have attended major scholarly conferences such as ICDAR: International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition, WWW: The Web Conference, and MM: ACM Multimedia.

The most cited University of Fribourg research publication is Rousseeuw’s (1987) “Silhouettes: A graphical aid to the interpretation and validation of cluster analysis.” This article appeared in the Journal of Computational and Applied Mathematics and has been cited 12,812 times.

The university’s second most cited publication is Schlapbach and Züttel’s (2001) “Hydrogen-storage materials for mobile applications,” which was published in Nature and has received 9,946 citations to date.

Moreover, the university’s third most cited publication is Schultz et al.'s (1997) “A neural substrate of prediction and reward,” which was published in Science and has received 9,258 citations.

Some of the university’s ERC-funded projects include Photonic structural materials with controlled disorder, Monitoring the melting of Greenland's ice sheet, and Molecular biophysics of cellular membranes.

Since 2014, Unifr has hosted one of the Swiss National Science Foundation’s National Centers for Competence in Research, namely, the NCCR for Bio-Inspired Materials. This interdisciplinary research center is recognized worldwide as an academic, innovation, and research hub for “smart” materials.

University of Fribourg research teams are part of other NCCRs, including NCCR MUST - Molecular Ultrafast Science and Technology, NCCR MARVEL - Materials' Revolution: Computational Design and Discovery of Novel Materials, NCCR Chemical Biology - Visualization and Control of Biological Processes Using Chemistry, and NCCR Affective Sciences - Emotions in Individual Behavior and Social Processes.