The École centrale de Lyon has strong ties with top institutions in Europe including Imperial College London and Darmstadt University of Technology. The university is one of the founding members of the Ecoles Centrales Group network (with campuses in Paris, Nantes, Lille, Marseille, and Beijing). It is also a founding member of University of Lyon's center for Research and Higher Education, which has over 120,000 students. Thus, it shares many of its Ph.D. programs with other institutions part of University of Lyon such as INSA Lyon, École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, and Claude Bernard University Lyon 1.