Education

KU Leuven offers a high quality, student oriented and international education. KU Leuven degrees offer a competitive advantage as they are highly valued throughout the world. Study programmes are research-based and organised within an innovative interdisciplinary framework, thus enabling students to adopt a critical, research and innovation-oriented attitude. The study programmes are flexible and use state-of-the-art ICT tools. The ECTS quality label guarantees that all credits obtained are transparent and fully transferable.The number of international students at KU Leuven has been rising steadily over the last few years, reaching the 8000 mark in 2013 with over 140 nationalities represented. Some 70 master programmes are taught in English, while PhD students are working in highly internationally composed research departments, mostly in a multilingual environment.

Research

KU Leuven has a rich tradition of learning and research for almost six centuries, which provided KU Leuven with its own dynamic international dimension. Research departments are part of global research communities, the leadership often taken by KU Leuven professors. KU Leuven is a charter member of the League of European Research Universities (comprising some 20 top European research universities). KU Leuven carries out fundamental and applied research in all academic disciplines with a clear international orientation. KU Leuven is currently by far the largest university in Belgium in terms of research funding and expenditure. It is also ranked among the top European universities: 744 PhD degrees in 2015-2016 (of which 40% for foreign PhD students), over 20.000 international peer-reviewed publications (2013-2015). The annual research expenditures in 2015 were around 462 million euro. More than one in three of our research staff is an international scholar. To strenghten international collaboration, KU Leuven has its own international research fellowship programme. KU Leuven participates in over 540 highly competitive European research projects (FP7, 2007-2013), ranking sixth in the league of HES institutions participating in FP7. These include 69 of the highly prestigious European Research Council grants (ERC). In Horizon 2020, KU Leuven currently has been approved 126 projects. Applied research is supported by the well-experienced KU Leuven Research & Development. Created in 1972 as one of the first technology transfer offices in Europe, LRD has a long tradition of promoting and supporting the transfer of knowledge and technology between the university and industry.LRD was rewarded the prestigious worldwide IPTEC Award for its achievements in technology transfer in 2008. LRD assists KU Leuven researchers in concluding over 1.000 new agreements anually for research collaboration projects. It also supports the commercialisation of intellectual property, which requires adequate protection and an appropriate transfer strategy to ensure that research innovation at KU Leuven finds its way into society. LRD stimulates the creation of spin-off companies by giving entrepreneurs the appropriate guidance and access to capital funding. LRD plays an important role in the knowledge-driven regional development and the construction of science parks and incubators in the Leuven region.