Ural Federal University

20th century

The Ural University was established in the town of Ekaterinburg in 1920 by a decree of the head of Soviet revolutionary government Vladimir Lenin. However, the university underwent a number of changes due to the lack of resources in such circumstances as revolution and civil war.

Finally, the university split into two: Ural State University (USU), a smaller university responsible for education in natural sciences, social sciences and humanities, and Ural Polytechnic Institute (USTU-UPI), a larger one focused on training engineers in areas such as metallurgy, machine-building, civil engineering and power engineering. At the same time, UPI was developing several new (for the time) areas of knowledge like nuclear energetics, organic chemistry and synthesis, and telecommunications. Despite such partition, both universities were connected closely with each other.

The first international students arrived at Ural University in the 1940s. During almost 100 years of the university's history, it has produced more than 2,500 specialists from Europe, Asia and Africa.

21st century

Since 2008, the university has been bearing the name of Boris Yeltsin, who graduated the Department of Civil Engineering in 1955 and became the first President of Russian Federation in 1991.

The merger process of USTU-UPI and USU to create Ural Federal University (UrFU) began in 2009 and was completed by the spring of 2011. The number of full-time students studying at UrFU exceeded 45,000 in 2024. The foreign students come from more than 100 countries, and are taught by more than 4,400 faculty members. 358 educational programs were provided by 13 institutes. More than 400,000 people have graduated from Ural Federal University over the years.

As of 2024, more than 4,400 international students study at UrFU. During the last ten years, the university was visited by more than 20 international delegations. Among them are the ambassadors of the US, France, United Kingdom, Sweden, The Republic of South Africa, and Mongolia.

Key areas of scientific research at UrFU:

Physics and astronomy: condensed matter physics, physics of magnetic materials, optics and laser physics, radio physics, electronics, acoustics, quantum theory of solids; spectroscopy of activated crystals, fundamental studies of properties of materials under extreme conditions, the physics of low-temperature and nonideal plasma and its use in power engineering and clean technologies; theoretical and experimental thermal physics, physical gas-kinetics and surface physics, physico-chemical mechanics of heterogeneous and multiphase media, stellar astronomy.

Power engineering: development of scientific principles of energy policy and mechanisms for its realization under market economy conditions, the fundamental problem of creating a safe and clean energy (including nuclear and fusion energy), non-conventional energy conversion processes, the fundamental problems of energy conservation and fuel efficiency.

Metallurgy: development of resource-saving and environmentally friendly processes of complex processing of ores and its wastes, the creation of new metallic materials with the desired properties.