Stanford University (officially Leland Stanford Junior University)^[11][12] is a private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford, the eighth governor of and then-incumbent senator from California, and his wife, Jane, in memory of their only child, Leland Jr.^[2]

The university admitted its first students in 1891,^[2][3] opening as a coeducational and non-denominational institution. It struggled financially after Leland died in 1893 and again after much of the campus was damaged by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.^[13] Following World War II, university provost Frederick Terman inspired an entrepreneurial culture to build a self-sufficient local industry (later Silicon Valley).^[14] In 1951, the Stanford Research Park was established in Palo Alto and is the world’s first university research park.^[15] By 2021, the university had 2,288 tenure-line faculty, senior fellows, center fellows, and medical faculty on staff.^[16]

The university is organized around seven schools of study on an 8,180-acre (3,310-hectare) campus, one of the largest in the nation.^[6] It houses the Hoover Institution, a public policy think tank, and is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”.^[17] Students compete in 36 varsity sports, and the university is one of eight private institutions in the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC). Stanford has won 131 NCAA team championships,^[18] and was awarded the NACDA Directors’ Cup for 25 consecutive years, beginning in 1994.^[19] Students and alumni have won 302 Olympic medals (including 153 gold).^[20]

The university is associated with 74 living billionaires,^[21] 58 Nobel laureates,^[16] 33 MacArthur Fellows,^[16] 29 Turing Award winners,^{[note 1]} as well as 7 Wolf Foundation Prize recipients, 2 Supreme Court Justices of the United States, and 4 Pulitzer Prize winners.^[16] Additionally, its alumni include many Fulbright Scholars, Marshall Scholars, Gates Cambridge Scholars, Rhodes Scholars, and members of the United States Congress.^[42]