Boston University is located in the heart of what many view as the world’s greatest university city.

With more than 32,500 undergraduate and graduate students from more than 130 countries, it is one of the largest universities in the greater Boston area, which is home to more than 100 higher education institutions.

It has around 10,000 faculty and staff, 17 schools and colleges and 250 fields of study located across two campuses and numerous international programmes, with facilities concentrated mainly on its impressive Charles River campus.

Around 75 per cent of undergraduates at Boston University live in student housing in and around campus, which contain 17 schools and colleges, 23 libraries and 450 active student societies.

Sport is a major part of college life, with around 7,000 students associated with sporting clubs and societies and more than 6,500 people using its fitness and recreation facilities each day.

Culture is also a strong feature, with more than 500 concerts and performances, and in excess of 50 exhibitions, taking place on campus annually.

As a member of the Association of American Universities, Boston is recognised as a leading global research institution, winning around $327 million in grants and contacts in 2015, of which $107 million related to clinical grants.

Arguably its most famous graduate is the civil rights leader Martin Luther King, who took his PhD studies at Boston University in the 1950s. Other notable alumni have made their mark in worlds of politics, science, entertainment, sport, journalism, law, academia, business and music.

Academy Award winners Geena Davis, Marisa Tomei and Julianne Moore attended the university, as did the notorious radio DJ Howard Stern, Fox News presenter Bill O’Reilly and Keith B. Alexander, a four-star general and director of the National Security Agency.

Several Nobel laureates are connected to the university. Novelist Saul Bellow taught literature at Boston and Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel remains a professor of the humanities. Former Boston scientist Sheldon Lee Glashow and Daniel C. Tsui , a current research professor, have received the Nobel Prize for Physics, while Dr King won the Peace Prize in 1964.

Two US poet laureates have also taught at Boston – Robert Lowell and Robert Pinsky – as did Derek Walcott, a Nobel laureate in literature.

Boston is also one of the US’s most international universities, with around 8,000 international students enrolled on its courses in total.

It has almost 100 study abroad programmes based in London, Paris and more than 30 other cities, and it also runs programmes in Los Angeles and Washington. It also runs almost 200 alumni abroad associations and operates more than 400 global initiatives, such as a project funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to fight infant mortality in Zambia.