The University of Bristol is a red-brick Russell Group research university in Bristol, England. It received its royal charter in 1909, although it can trace its roots to a Merchant Venturers’ school founded in 1595 and University College, Bristol, which had been in existence since 1876.

Bristol is organized into six academic faculties composed of multiple schools and departments running over 200 undergraduate courses, largely in the Tyndalls Park area of the city. The university had a total income of £902.2 million in 2022–23, of which £203.3 million was from research grants and contracts. It is the largest independent employer in Bristol. Current academics include 23 fellows of the Academy of Medical Sciences, 13 fellows of the British Academy, 43 fellows of the Academy of Social Sciences, 13 fellows of the Royal Academy of Engineering, and 48 fellows of the Royal Society. The University of Bristol’s alumni and faculty include 13 Nobel laureates.

Bristol is a member of the Russell Group of research-intensive British universities, the European-wide Coimbra Group, and the Worldwide Universities Network, of which the university’s previous vice-chancellor, Eric Thomas, was chairman from 2005 to 2007. In addition, the university holds an Erasmus Charter, sending more than 500 students per year to partner institutions in Europe. It has an average of 6.4 (Sciences faculty) to 13.1 (Medicine & Dentistry Faculty) applicants for each undergraduate place.

Among the famous names associated with Bristol in this early period is Paul Dirac, who graduated in 1921 with a degree in engineering, before obtaining a second degree in mathematics in 1923 from Cambridge. For his subsequent pioneering work on quantum mechanics, he was awarded the 1933 Nobel Prize for Physics. Later in the 1920s, the H.H. Wills Physics Laboratory was opened by Ernest Rutherford. It has since housed several Nobel Prize winners: Cecil Frank Powell (1950); Hans Albrecht Bethe (1967); and Sir Nevill Francis Mott (1977). The laboratory stands on the same site today, close to the Bristol Grammar School and the city museum.