From a private school to a federal campus

From eleven students to a federal institute

On 7 November 1853 eleven students began classes at the École spéciale de Lausanne, a private school modelled on the École Centrale in Paris. Its first students graduated in 1855, shortly before the polytechnic in Zurich opened. In 1869 it became the technical school of the Académie de Lausanne, and in 1890, when the Académie became a university, it was renamed the École d’ingénieurs de l’Université de Lausanne.

In 1905 the school awarded one of the first engineering degrees to a woman, Cécile Butticaz; EPFL says it may have been the very first. A bid for federal status was refused in 1943. In 1944 the school moved into the former Hôtel Savoy on Avenue de Cour, and in 1946 it was renamed the École polytechnique de l’Université de Lausanne, EPUL, and gained a physics department.

The change came under Maurice Cosandey, who became head of EPUL in 1963 with the aim of making it a federal institute. On 1 January 1969 it became EPFL, the second Federal Institute of Technology after ETH Zurich, with more than 1,000 students.

A campus by the lake

In the 1970s the federal government funded a long project to bring the school together on a single site in Écublens-Dorigny, west of the city. The first buildings opened on 20 July 1978, and the move was completed in 2001, when the architecture department arrived. In 2019, fifty years after the school became federal, the campus gained a new central square, Place Cosandey.

Innovation came onto the campus early: in 1991 a Science Park Foundation opened there, and in 2014 it became EPFL Innovation Park. EPFL also has sites in Neuchâtel (Microcity, 2009), in Valais and Fribourg (2014) and in Geneva, at Campus Biotech (2015).

The campus in numbers

In autumn 2025 EPFL had 14,072 students: 7,001 at bachelor level, 4,471 at master level and 2,465 doctoral students. Women made up 31.7 per cent of the students, and 54.8 per cent of students came from abroad. EPFL had 6,441 staff, including 378 professors, from more than 130 nationalities.

Its budget in 2025 was CHF 1,188 million, of which CHF 728 million, or 61 per cent, came from the federal government and CHF 460 million from third-party funding. In the same year 39 start-ups were founded at EPFL, and 168 companies were based at EPFL Innovation Park.

Schools and colleges

EPFL’s teaching and research are organised in five schools: Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering (ENAC), Basic Sciences (SB), Engineering (STI), Computer and Communication Sciences (IC) and Life Sciences (SV). Alongside them is the College of Management of Technology (CDM), which teaches management of technology and financial engineering. The Swiss Plasma Center belongs to the School of Basic Sciences.

Until recently there was a second college, the College of Humanities (CDH), set up in 2002 together with the Universities of Lausanne and Geneva. It has since been closed: from 1 January 2026 its activities, including the social and human sciences programme and the digital humanities, are being transferred step by step to the schools IC and ENAC and to two of EPFL’s vice-presidencies (status as of 3 November 2026).

Part of the ETH Domain

EPFL belongs to the ETH Domain, the group of federal institutions that also includes ETH Zurich and four research institutes: PSI, WSL, Empa and Eawag. The ETH Board is its strategic management body. More on this on City & Region.

Landmarks on campus

The Rolex Learning Center, designed by the Japanese architects SANAA (Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa), opened in 2010, the year SANAA received the Pritzker Prize. The City of Lausanne notes that the competition had drawn some of the best-known architects of the time, among them Zaha Hadid, Herzog & de Meuron, Rem Koolhaas and Jean Nouvel. The building is a single, undulating floor of about 170 by 120 metres, with no main façade: visitors walk in under an arch, through a patio and up gentle slopes, and apart from the slopes there are no physical divisions between the spaces. It was built for CHF 110 million in a public-private partnership and houses the EPFL library.

Next to it are the EPFL Pavilions, designed by Kengo Kuma, which opened in November 2016 under the name ArtLab as a place where art, engineering and the humanities meet. Both are open to the public; see Science Travel.

Two notes on research

In July 2022 the EPFL mathematician Maryna Viazovska, holder of the Chair of Number Theory, received the Fields Medal, one of the highest awards in mathematics.

From 2005 to the end of 2024, EPFL ran the Blue Brain Project, which built digital reconstructions of the brain. Since 2025 its work has been continued by an independent non-profit foundation. EPFL’s neuroscience and neuroengineering centres are now at Campus Biotech in Geneva (see Geneva.science).