Technical University of Denmark

Founded in 1829 with the mission of creating value for the benefit of society, DTU is an international elite technical university where education, scientific advice, and innovation rest on a solid foundation of world-class research.

The University is at the academic and multidisciplinary forefront of the technical and the natural sciences—with new initiatives in a number of demanding engineering disciplines, including sustainable energy technology and life science.

For almost two centuries DTU, Technical University of Denmark, has been dedicated to fulfilling the vision of H.C. Ørsted—the father of electromagnetism—who founded the university in 1829 to develop and create value using the natural sciences and the technical sciences to benefit society.

Today, DTU is ranked as one of the foremost technical universities in Europe, continues to set new records in the number of publications, and persistently increase and develop our partnerships with industry, and assignments accomplished by DTU’s scientific advice.

The number of student enrolment is higher than ever and, for the eleventh consecutive year, we have received a record-breaking number of applications from students who want to pursue a degree from a technical elite university with a global outlook.

The international dimension is of vital importance to DTU. In 2014, we welcomed 538 international students into our MSc programmes, half of our PhD students are recruited from abroad, and more than one third of our scientific staff are highly qualified researchers of international backgrounds. In addition, the extent and intensity of our collaborations with other leading technical universities around the world continue to grow.

DTU has international educational exchange programmes with over 200 universities around the globe, and enjoys close research collaborations with our partners in addition to building research and educational programmes with the Nordic Five Tech Alliance, the Euro Tech Universities Alliance, KAIST in South Korea, the Sino-Danish Center in Beijing, Rensselaer in the U.S., and Nanyang in Singapore.

DTU’s main campus is located north of Copenhagen near the town of Lyngby. More than 100 buildings are scattered across the 106-hectare great plain, which is divided into four quadrants – exactly like points in a coordinate system.

The campus is safe and secure and a site of great natural beauty: wooded areas, squares, inner courtyards and gardens, sports fields and a central avenue are nestled in the gaps between the buildings and combine to create an aesthetically pleasing architectural statement.

The architect duo, Eva and Nils Koppel and the landscape design copule, Edith and Ole Nørgaard, were commissioned to design the University in the forest.Construciton work began in 1960 and continued until 1977. DTU is currently investing more than DKK 4 billion in a comprehensive transformation of the university's buildings and infrastructure, read more on the transformation of DTU.

When the College of Advanced Technology was founded in 1829, Denmark had its first MSc programme in Engineering at a high academic level. The College changed its name to Danish Technical College in 1933 and finally became the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) in 1994.

DTU has always had a strong theoretical grounding. H.C. Ørsted, the man who discovered electromagnetism, founded the College in the image of École Polytechnique in France. The objective was to educate young men to work in industry, but in the beginning DTU was not able to teach practice, so the college mainly educated technical teachers.

Not until industrialisation really took off in the beginning of the 1870s did engineers from DTU begin to fill public-sector posts and they began to have play a major role in industry. Still, most major engineering projects were still carried out by foreign companies. But in the 1880s, foreign companies lost their influence and Danish engineers gradually began working abroad.

Just after the turn of the last century, under the headship of the great industrialist, G.A. Hagemann, DTU finally achieved an international level of excellence. In the first two decades of the 1900s, Danish engineers captured the international scene in structural engineering, shipbuilding and electrical engineering. DTU was now ready to educate the engineers needed to create the modern industrial society.

The College was founded in a professor’s manor in the heart of Copenhagen, Studiestræde/Skt. Pedersstræde. The new buildings at Sølvtorvet from 1889 did not have the laboratory facilities a modern institution needed. A boom in the number of students also meant that the buildings were too small. Immediate expansion was necessary. On its 100th anniversary in 1929, DTU lay the foundation stone for a new building complex at Østervoldgade. From 1962 to 1974, DTU moved to its current premises in Lundtofte near Lyngby, north of Copenhagen. Finally, the University had all the space it needed: approximately 375,000 square metres.

In 2014, DTU was granted an institutional accreditation by the Danish Accreditation Institution (member of ENQA). The institutional accreditation ensures that the quality assurance system of the institution is well-described, well-argued, and well-functioning in practice.