Our vibrant community

Team science is crucial in the pursuit of groundbreaking, interdisciplinary research and inspiring education. In open dialogues and encouragement, we stimulate curiosity and new initiatives based on scientific and fundamental insights.

World class infrastructure

The Faculty of Science has an excellent and extensive infrastructure for its research activities. Many of the facilities are among the top research facilities in Europe and are made available to both internal and external researchers.

Netherlands Plant-Ecophenotyping Centre
NMR Large Scale Facility
Motion Capture and Virtual Reality Lab
Teaching and Learning Lab

Facts & Figures

  • 1795 employees work in our faculty. In 2022 414 new employees joined our faculty, with an average age of 32.

  • 66 nationalities are represented in our faculty. 89 colleagues come from Germany, 60 are Italian and 43 originate from China

  • 70% of our employees has a 1 fte appointment. 25% of our colleagues work part-time and have an appointment between 0.2 and 0.8 fte.

Impact

The Faculty of Science and Utrecht University encourage and support researchers in increasing the impact of their research. Here are some stories about research based startups.

uCrowds

Crowd simulation

What are the effects of specific measures on the course of events? Computer scientist Roland Geraerts and his start-up uCrowds investigated this for the Dutch general election on 17 March. The simulations show that voting takes more time, but that the total delays are manageable. 

Scientific mural paintings Utrecht

Mural formula Doppler effect

How many people in Utrecht know about the groundbreaking discoveries made in their city? And that these are made by people who walked through the same streets as them? To give those discoveries more fame, multiple places in Utrecht will showcase mural paintings about these scientific disoveries. 
The project is started by Utrecht physicists Sander Kempkes and Ingmar Swart.

All about plastic soup

To create awareness about all aspects of plastic soup, a website has been built for everyone who is working on a school paper, or wants to give a presentation about plastic pollution in the ocean. On the site everything about ‘plastic soup’: from how it was created to solutions for a plastic-free ocean, is explained. All of the website contents are based on scientific articles.
Erik van Sebille and Aike Vonk are the founders of this website.