Ural Federal University, located in the city of Ekaterinburg, Russia, is a leading research and educational institution. Founded in 1920 as the Ural Polytechnic Institute, it was renamed after the Russian Revolution of 1917 to honor its founder, Mikhail Lomonosov. The university has an enrollment of over 34,000 students and offers courses in engineering, humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences.
Notable alumni of Ural Federal University include cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin; novelist Vladimir Nabokov; physicist Andrei Sakharov; chemist Dmitri Mendeleev; and president of Kyrgyzstan Almazbek Atambayev. The university has produced six Nobel Prize winners: Aleksandr Prokhorov (physics), Nikolay Semyonov (chemistry), Peter Kapitza (physics), Lev Landau (physics), Igor Tamm (physics), and Pyotr Kapitsa (physics).
The main campus of Ural Federal University is located on the edge of Ekaterinburg’s historical center. It consists of over 60 buildings connected by underground passages. The university also has campuses in Nizhny Tagil and Kamensk-Uralsky, as well as a distance learning program.
Ural Federal University is one of the leading research universities in Russia. It has 14 specialized research institutes and centers, including the Institute for Metal Physics named after Academician Egor Konovalenko, which is part of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The university conducts research in such areas as nanotechnology, information technology, energy physics, space science, ecology, biomedicine, economics, sociology, philology ,and law .
In recent years ,the university has received international recognition for its academic programs and research achievements . In 2012 ,it was ranked among the world’s top 300 universities by Times Higher Education . In 2013 , Quacquarelli Symonds included it in their list of top 400 universities worldwide . And in 2014 ,the ShanghaiRanking Consultancy ranked Ural Federal University as one of the world’s top 500 universities .