Lund University is a public university in Sweden and one of northern Europe's oldest universities. The university is located in the city of Lund in the province of Scania, Sweden. It traces its roots back to 1425, when a Franciscan studium generale was founded in Lund. After Sweden won Scania from Denmark in the 1658 Treaty of Roskilde, the university was officially founded in 1666 on the location of the old studium generale next to Lund Cathedral.

Lund University has nine faculties, with additional campuses in the cities of Malmö and Helsingborg, with 40,000 students in 270 different programmes and 1,300 freestanding courses. The university has some 600 partner universities in nearly 70 countries and it belongs to the League of European Research Universities as well as the global Universitas 21 network.[6] Lund University is consistently ranked among the world's top 100 universities.

Two major facilities for materials research are in Lund University: MAX IV, a synchrotron radiation laboratory – inaugurated in June 2016, and European Spallation Source (ESS), a new European facility that will provide up to 100 times brighter neutron beams than existing facilities today, to be opened in 2023.

The university centers on the Lundagård park adjacent to the Lund Cathedral, with various departments spread in different locations in town, but mostly concentrated in a belt stretching north from the park connecting to the university hospital area and continuing out to the northeastern periphery of the town, where one finds the large campus of the Faculty of Engineering.