With over 37,000 students and more than 7,000 employees, the University of Copenhagen is the largest institution of research and education in Denmark. The purpose of the University – to quote the University Statute – is to ’conduct research and provide further education to the highest academic level’.

Approximately one hundred different institutes, departments, laboratories, centres, museums, etc., form the nucleus of the University, where professors, lecturers and other academic staff, as well as most of the technical and administrative personnel, carry out their daily work, and where teaching takes place.

The Department of Veterinary Pathobiology is one of four institutes at the Faculty of Life Sciences at the Copenhagen University. The department is organized in six research groups: the pharmacy, biomedicine, microbiology, special pathology, parasitology and one group within virology, immunology and fish diseases. It has about 190 employees, including 100 academic staff (incl Ph.D. students). The turn over of the department was in 2005 85 mill Danish Kroner, including 44 million core funding with the remaining 41 million coming from external funding. The microbiology and parasitology groups include researchers with expertise on environmental hygiene used in research focus areas on infectious agents and their interaction, survival and transmission within the external environment and to/from humans and animals, including fish.