University of Klagenfurt

University of Klagenfurt

Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt
Motto	Per Aspera Ad Astra (Latin)
Motto in English	Through hardships to the stars
Type	Public research university
Established	1970 / 1975 / 1993
Budget	€ 74 million (2022)
Rector	Ada Pellert (as of Dec 1, 2024)
Academic staff	1,203 (2021)
Total staff	1,500 (2023) [1]
Students	12,721 (2023) [1]
Doctoral students	471 (2021/22)
Location	Klagenfurt , Austria
Campus	Suburban, 27 acres (11 ha)
Colors	Shades of Blue
Affiliations	AACSB, YERUN
Website	www.aau.at

The University of Klagenfurt (German: Universität Klagenfurt or Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt, AAU) is a federal Austrian research university and the largest research and higher education institution in the state of Carinthia. It has its campus in Klagenfurt.

Originally founded in 1970 and relaunched in 1993, the university today holds faculties of arts, humanities & education, management, economics & law, social sciences, and technical sciences. It is listed in the ARWU, THE, and QS global rankings and held rank 48 worldwide in THE's Young University Rankings 2021.^[2]

The university has defined three research priority areas, Social Ecology (until 2018, transferred to BOKU Vienna), Networked and Autonomous Systems, and Multiple Perspectives in Optimization, with the former spawning three ERC Grants and the latter a doc.funds programme of the Austrian Science Fund. It has launched a new initiative, Humans in the Digital Age (HDA), in 2019, hosting an ERC Grant on cybersecurity.

It also holds a number of central facilities such as the Robert Musil Institute (co-organizer of the Bachmann Prize), the Karl Popper Kolleg (an Institute for Advanced Study), the University Cultural Centre (UNIKUM), the build! Gründerzentrum (a start-up facilitation center), the University Sports Centre (USI), and the Klagenfurt University Library.

Starting Dec 1, 2024, the university's rector will be Ada Pellert, former rector of the University of Hagen, following Oliver Vitouch in this capacity. Martin Hitz chairs the Academic Senate; Werner Wutscher is chairman of the University Council.

The University of Klagenfurt is situated 30 km from the Slovenian and 60 km from the Italian border and supports bi- and multilingualism, especially in the context of the Slovenian minority in Carinthia. Together with the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano (Italy) and the University of Fribourg (Switzerland), it is among the three southernmost universities in the German-speaking world.