University of Arizona

Founded in 1885 in Tucson before Arizona became a state, the University of Arizona has an enrolment of about 40,000 students. It has around 3,000 academic staff and an endowment of nearly half a billion dollars. Its 150 hectare campus contains numerous museums including the Arizona State Museum, the University of Arizona Museum of Art, and the Museum of Optics. The University acquired Biosphere 2 in 2007, a facility that contains a representative rainforest, ocean, mangrove wetlands, savannah grassland and a desert used to study both the functioning of these biomes and, incidentally, the psychological study of small groups of humans living in isolation. Another notable facility is the Steward Observatory Mirror Lab which employs about a hundred astronomers with PhDs.