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Technion Israel Institute of Technology is Israel¡¯s biggest science and engineering university, located in the city of Haifa.

It is made up of 18 faculties offering around 50 undergraduate programmes and dozens of graduate courses, covering the main science and engineering disciplines and associated fields such as architecture, medicine and computer science.

The institute is renowned for the research that it conducts in fields such as biotechnology, space science, nanotechnology, stem cell science, and energy.

Technion researchers have won Nobel Prizes for chemistry on several occasions in recent years, beginning in 2004, when Aaron Ciechanover and Avram Hershko shared the award with an American colleague for their work on protein degradation. In 2011, Dan Chectman took the prize for his work on the formation of quasicrystals, two years before a Technion graduate, Arieh Warshel, was victorious.

The university maintains a network of international relationships, operating the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute in New York in partnership with Cornell University, and opening a campus in China¡¯s Guangdong province.

Technion itself predates the modern state of Israel, having been founded in 1912 in what was then the Ottoman Empire.

The institution was the scene of Israel¡¯s ¡°battle of the languages¡±, a debate over what the language of instruction should be, with Hebrew eventually being chosen.

In 1923, physicist Albert Einstein visited the site and planted a palm tree which still stands outside the university¡¯s original building in central Haifa.

Later, the university moved to a large site on the north-eastern slopes of Mount Carmel.

Haifa is Israel¡¯s third largest city with a population of more than 250,000 which includes people from a wide range of backgrounds, including Jews, Muslims and Christians.