Université Paris Diderot

With its 26,000 students, 20% of whom are international, its 2,000 faculty and its 92 research laboratories, it is a major actor in European higher education and research. According to its own tradition and humanist principles set out by eighteenth-century encyclopaedist Denis Diderot, the university’s ambition is to enlighten 21st-century society by opening up new fields of study, renewing traditional disciplines, developing and enhancing the achievements and results of research, and connecting with the community at large.

The University has acquired an international reputation for the excellence of its standards of research in all the fields in which it is active, namely science, medicine, dentistry, art and humanities and social sciences. The University has recently (2007) relocated its central administration and most of its departments in a newly developing area of Paris – known as Paris Rive Gauche – a few streets south east of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Former industrial buildings have been rehabilitated, thus preserving an important link with the history of Paris, while brand new ones have also been commissioned from world-class architects.

By 2012, all departments – except the 7 university hospitals located in the north of Paris – will have joined the new campus, which also features Paris’s largest and newest university library.