The University of Würzburg – full name, the Julian Maximilian University of Würzburg – located in northern Bavaria, dates back to 1402 and is one the oldest universities in Germany. After it was all but destroyed during a World War II bombing raid, the university re-established itself in the 1960s on the fringes of the city.
Consisting of 10 faculties, the university has around 28,000 students and offers academic study in the humanities, law and economics, life sciences, and natural sciences and technology. There is a strong focus on science at the university and many of its centres have won funding from the German Research Foundation. In 2002, one of just three Centres of Excellence funded by the German Research Foundation – the Rudolph Virchow Centre – was launched at Würzburg.