University of Tübingen

The University of Tübingen, officially Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, is one of Germany's oldest universities, founded on July 3, 1477 by Count Eberhard the Bearded. It received its current name in 1769 when Duke Karl Eugen added his name to honor the founder. Situated in the medieval university town of Tübingen in southwestern Germany, the institution has educated notable figures including Kepler, Hegel, Hölderlin, and Schelling, and was the first German university to establish a faculty of natural sciences in 1863. Today the university comprises seven faculties spanning theology, law, medicine, humanities, economics and social sciences, and science. As of winter 2024-25, it educates approximately 28,609 students across over 200 degree programs, and employs 541 professors, 5,662 faculty members, and 2,648 staff, plus more than 11,000 employees at the affiliated university hospital. Total annual funding in 2024 was approximately 789.8 million euros, including 456.9 million euros in state funding and 279.6 million euros in third-party research funding. In 2019, the university was designated a University of Excellence under Germany's national Excellence Strategy, one of only eleven institutions to receive this distinction. It holds six Clusters of Excellence, including the Cluster of Excellence 'Machine Learning: New Perspectives for Science,' which received renewed funding for a second period (2026-2032). This cluster aims to position machine learning at the center of scientific discovery across disciplines. Tübingen has emerged as one of Europe's premier hubs for AI research. The Tübingen AI Center, hosted by the university in cooperation with the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, conducts foundational research on robust, efficient, and accountable learning systems. The ELLIS Institute Tübingen, established in 2023, focuses on cutting-edge foundational AI research and operates as part of the European ELLIS network. Research groups at the university work on safe deep learning, adversarial robustness, AI alignment, causal inference, and the ethics of AI. The university also has an active AI Safety student initiative (AI Safety Tübingen) and an Effective Altruism group.