Most institutes and clinics are still in the Länggasse, the traditional university district adjoining the city centre, within walking distance of one another.

[13] The roots of the University of Bern go back to the sixteenth century, when a collegiate school was needed to train new pastors after the Reformation.

As part of its reorganization of higher education, the government of Bern transformed the existing theological college into an academy with four faculties in 1805.

The liberals gained control of the Canton of Bern in 1831 and in 1834 turned the academy into a university, with an academic staff of 45 to teach 167 students.

Owing to the political situation, it was not until the promulgation of the federal constitution in 1848 that the university was able to embark on a period of peaceful development.

This rapid growth reflected the university's attraction for foreign students, in particular Germans and Russians, who accounted for half of the total enrollment.

The following year, Anna Tumarkin, a Russian philosopher, was appointed to an extraordinary professorship and thus became the first female professor at a European university entitled to examine doctoral and post-doctoral theses.

In the following years the university consolidated its position as a small centre of higher learning with a stable enrollment of about 2,000 students.

[5] After World War II, a growing number of voices called for the expansion of tertiary education in Switzerland.

The Physics Institute contributed to the first flight to the Moon and still carries out experiments and provides apparatus for NASA and ESA space missions on a regular basis.

[16][17][18] In addition to the classical disciplines, the University of Bern has also established programmes in newer ones such as sports science and theatre studies.

[20] The Graduate Schools for doctoral candidates offer further-reaching programmes that are closely linked to the university's research priorities in the fields of climate science, health care and penal law and criminology.

In addition, the University of Bern has also taken the lead in the German-speaking world in creating a number of novel study programmes, for instance Evaluation.

CHEOPS is a planned European space telescope for the study of the formation of extrasolar planets, with a launch window in October to November 2019.

For example: the biomedical engineering programmes of the Artificial Organ (ARTORG) Center for Biomedical Engineering Research; the Public Management and Policy programme of the Center of Competence for Public Management (CCPM); the WTI (offering MAS, LLM, and PhD programs in international economics and economic law);[26] and the OCCR graduate school (offersing an MSc and a PhD program in Climate Sciences, as well as a Swiss Climate Summer School).

Finally, the ice core analyses of physicist Hans Oeschger played a pioneering role in the development of climate research.

Other notable academics at the University of Bern include (by faculty):[citation needed] Eduard Herzog, Ulrich Luz, Adolf Schlatter, Lukas Vischer, Eduard Zeller Carl Hilty, Eugen Huber Jakob Klaesi, Emil Theodor Kocher, Hugo Kronecker, Theodor Langhans, Ludwig Lichtheim, Maurice Edmond Müller, Fritz de Quervain, Hermann Sahli, Gabriel Gustav Valentin, Esther Fischer-Homberger Andreas Alföldi, Elisabeth Ettlinger, Carl Heinrich Wilhelm Hagen, Walther Killy, Julius Pokorny, Ignaz Paul Vitalis Troxler, Anna Tumarkin, Hermann Usener, George van Driem Albert Einstein, Heinrich Greinacher, Hans Oeschger, Ludwig Schläfli, Bernhard Studer, Hugo von Mohl, Heinrich von Wild, Hugo Hadwiger Alfred Amonn, Max Weber Theodor Oskar Rubeli The following prominent persons studied at the University of Bern: