Short answers, pulled from the story.
The University of Zurich was founded on the 29th of April 1833. It was the first university in Europe to be established by a democratic state rather than by a monarch or the church.
The Zurich Seven were the first seven women to earn medical degrees at the University of Zurich. They were Nadezhda Suslova (Russia), Frances Elizabeth Morgan (England), Louisa Atkins (England), Maria Bokova (Russia), Eliza Walker (Scotland), Susan Dimock (United States), and Marie Vögtlin (Switzerland). Suslova graduated as a doctor of medicine in 1867.
Albert Einstein received his PhD from the University of Zurich's philosophical faculty in 1905 and was appointed associate professor there in 1909. In 2022, the university had his original doctoral certificate returned to it.
Twelve Nobel Prize recipients are associated with the University of Zurich, primarily in Physics and Chemistry. They include Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen (Physics, 1901), Albert Einstein (Physics, 1921), and Erwin Schrödinger (Physics, 1933).
In April 2025, University of Zurich researchers ran an undisclosed experiment on Reddit's "Change my View" subreddit using large language models to influence users' opinions. The study was conducted without informed consent and involved impersonating members of groups including LGBT people and sexual assault survivors. Reddit's Chief Legal Officer called it "deeply wrong on both a moral and legal level" and submitted legal demands; the university subsequently announced the research would not be published and pledged a stricter ethics review process.
In 2024, the University of Zurich voluntarily withdrew from the Times Higher Education World University Rankings, stating that the ranking could not reflect the full range of its teaching and research activities and was pushing universities to prioritise publication volume over quality. Before the withdrawal, the university regularly ranked in the top hundred worldwide.