The University of Pennsylvania is a private Ivy League research university in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S. It is one of nine colonial colleges and was chartered prior to the U.S. Declaration of Independence when Benjamin Franklin, the university's founder and first president, advocated for an educational institution that trained leaders in academia, commerce, and public service. Penn identifies as the fourth oldest institution of higher education in the United States, though this representation is challenged by other universities, as Franklin first convened the board of trustees in 1749, arguably making it the fifth oldest institution of higher education in the U.S.
A 1765 admission ticket to "A Course of Lectures" given by Dr. John Morgan, the founder and first professor of medicine at Penn's Medical School
A c. 1815 illustration of the Ninth Street campus of the University of Pennsylvania, including the medical department (on left) and the college building (on right)
An illustration of Penn's College Hall from a pocket guide to the Centennial Exhibition in 1876
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.
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.