University of Strasbourg University of Strasbourg The University of Strasbourg (, Unistra or UDS) in Strasbourg, Alsace, France, is a university in France with nearly 51,000 students and over 3,200 researchers. The French university traces its history to the earlier German-language "Universität Straßburg", which was founded in 1538, and was divided in the 1970s into three separate institutions: Louis Pasteur University, Marc Bloch University, and Robert Schuman University. On 1 January 2009, the fusion of these three universities reconstituted a united University of Strasbourg. With as many as 19 Nobel laureates, the university is now ranked among the best in the League of
Strasbourg and home to 13% of the Grand Est region's inhabitants. The transnational Eurodistrict Strasbourg-Ortenau had a population of 915,000 inhabitants in 2014. Strasbourg is one of the "de facto" capitals of the European Union (alongside Brussels and Luxembourg), as it is the seat of several European institutions, such as the Council of Europe (with its European Court of Human Rights, its European Directorate for the Quality of Medicines and its European Audiovisual Observatory) and the Eurocorps, as well as the European Parliament and the European Ombudsman of the European Union. The city is also the seat of the Central Commission