Stockholm University (SU) was founded in 1878, following the earlier establishments of Karolinska Institutet (KI, 1810) and the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH, 1827). Several other higher educational institutes (HEIs) were also established at around the same time in Stockholm, contributing to a landscape of a multitude of HEIs each covering one academic speciality with SU being the only one encompassing multiple faculties. The Swedish government, as well as many within the academic community, expressed a strong interest in merging Stockholm's HEIs into a single university in the early-to-mid-1950s. However, due to a set of unforeseen developments during the spring of 1954, the integration process never came to a completion. As a result, there is no medical faculty at SU; this area of study is instead covered by KI, a separate university. Likewise, there is no engineering faculty at SU, it is the domain of KTH. The main campuses of the three universities, SU (multi-faculty), KI (medical faculty) and KTH (engineering faculty), are located within a small distance of each other, only a few kilometres, and may effectively be regarded as forming a shared campus area.
Internationally, the three universities SU, KI and KTH often act as a single entity – called the Stockholm Trio – with the collaboration agreement with Tokyo University illustrating this well since Tokyo was specifically seeking a partnership with a university ranked among the global top ten. Thus, from an international perspective, it makes sense to regard the Trio as the unified entity it was intended to become already far more than half a century ago. In terms of combined research output, the Trio holds position nine in the world.
