Stanford University is a private research university in Stanford, California. It was founded in 1885 by Leland Stanford—a railroad magnate who served as the eighth governor of and then-incumbent senator from California—and his wife, Jane, in memory of their only child, Leland Jr. Stanford has an 8,180-acre (3,310-hectare) campus, among the largest in the nation. It is also frequently ranked amongst the most prestigious and highly respected universities in the world.
Statue of the Stanford family on the Stanford University campus
Center of the campus in 1891
Ichthyologist and founding president of Stanford, David Starr Jordan
William Shockley, Stanford professor, Nobel laureate in physics, "Father of Silicon Valley"
A research university or a research-intensive university is a university that is committed to research as a central part of its mission. They are "the key sites of knowledge production", along with "intergenerational knowledge transfer and the certification of new knowledge" through the awarding of doctoral degrees, and continue to be "the very center of scientific productivity". They can be public or private, and often have well-known brand names.
Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835) is responsible for the Humboldtian model of higher education.
Nuclear research at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, a research university, in Madison, Wisconsin, United States, May 2005
Switzerland spends 0.76% of GDP on university research funding as of 2017, some 3.8x the ratio of the United States (0.20%). ETH Zurich, founded in 1854, is the leading Swiss research university by its number of scholars and publications.
Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, founded in 1876, is considered the first research university in the United States and as of fiscal year 2020 had been the national leader in annual research and development spending for over four decades.
