Karlsruhe Institute of Technology

The Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT; German: Karlsruher Institut für Technologie) is a public research university in Karlsruhe, Germany. The institute is a national research center of the Helmholtz Association. KIT was created in 2009 when the University of Karlsruhe (Universität Karlsruhe), founded in 1825 as a public research university and also known as the "Fridericiana", merged with the Karlsruhe Research Center (Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe), which had originally been established in 1956 as a national nuclear research center (Kernforschungszentrum Karlsruhe, or KfK). KIT is thus the first and only institution in Germany to overcome the division of the German scientific and research landscape into academic and non-academic institutions in the form of a merger of two different types of institutions. KIT is a member of the TU9, an incorporated society of the largest and most notable German institutes of technology.[8] As part of the German Universities Excellence Initiative KIT was one of three universities which were awarded excellence status in 2006.[9] In the following "German Excellence Strategy" KIT was awarded as one of eleven "Excellence Universities" in 2019. In the university part of today's KIT, science-based mechanical engineering was founded in the mid-19th century under the direction of Ferdinand Redtenbacher, which influenced the foundation of other technical universities, such as ETH Zurich in 1855 It established the first German faculty for computer science in 1972. On 2 August 1984, the university received the first-ever German e-mail. KIT alumni and faculty include six Nobel Prize laureates and nine Leibniz Prize winners. The Karlsruhe Institute of Technology is well known for many inventors and entrepreneurs who studied or taught there, including Heinrich Hertz, Karl Friedrich Benz and the founders of SAP SE.