Stanford University

Leland Stanford Junior University is a private research university in Stanford, California, next to the city of Palo Alto, in Santa Clara County. It is a world-class institution and one of the top universities in the country. It was founded in 1885, by railroad tycoon and former California Governor Leland Stanford and his wife Jane Lathrop Stanford, as a memorial to their only son, Leland Jr., who died at the age of 16 while travelling in Europe. The university was built on the site of Leland Stanford's horse farm. It covers over 8,000 acres, making it one of the largest universities in the world. It enrolls about 6,700 undergraduates and 8,000 graduate students, wtih 1,700 faculty members. It includes a business school, law school, and medical school. Associated with it are Stanford Hospital and the Lucile Salter Packard Children's Hospital. It is largely responsible for giving birth to Silicon Valley as a major center of technology. Many large Silicon Valley companies, such as Hewlett-Packard, Cisco Systems, Yahoo!, Google, and Sun Microsystems, have their roots in Stanford. Below are pictures taken on the Stanford University campus.