Johannes Kepler University Linz

The Johannes Kepler University Linz stands on a 36-hectare park campus in the Auhof area of Linz’s St Magdalena district. The university began in 1966 as a college for social sciences, economics and business, and gained full university status in 1975 when the faculty of law was added. It now hosts around 27,000 students, with one in nine coming from abroad. The campus has grown with new buildings and the JKU Science Park, and is named after the astronomer Johannes Kepler who worked in Linz in the early 17th century. The university is organised into four faculties covering social sciences, engineering, law and medicine, alongside interdisciplinary programmes such as Leading Innovative Organisations and Web Sciences. The Faculty of Engineering and Natural Sciences includes 51 institutes and the Research Institute for Symbolic Computation in nearby Hagenberg. Notable alumni include Michaela Benthaus, the first wheelchair user to travel to space, and Bernd Bergmair, majority owner of Mindgeek. Visitors find a landscaped park with a central pond and modern university buildings. The campus is served by tram lines 1 and 2 and express bus 77, with a cycle path along the Danube providing another route. Several large student dormitories lie within walking distance, and some convert into summer hotels. The Johann Radon Institute for Computational and Applied Mathematics is based on campus, while the Hagenberg institute sits in Schloß Hagenberg a short distance away.