Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology
laboratory in Dübendorf, Switzerland
The Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology (Empa; German: Eidgenössische Materialprüfungs- und Forschungsanstalt, French: Laboratoire fédéral d’essai des matériaux et de recherche, Italian: Laboratorio federale di prova dei materiali e di ricerca, Romansh: Institut federal da controlla da material e da perscrutaziun,) is a Swiss research institution for application-oriented materials science and technology. It has three locations – Dübendorf, St. Gallen and Thun. As part of the ETH Domain, it is assigned to the Federal Department of Economic Affairs, Education and Research (EAER). For more than 100 years since its foundation in 1880, Empa has been a material testing institute. Since the late 1980s, it has increasingly transformed into an interdisciplinary research institute for materials and technologies.
Research
Under the vision “Materials and Technologies for a Sustainable Future”, Empa has set itself the goal of developing solutions to priority problems facing industry and society, for example in the areas of energy, the environment, mobility, health and safety. In doing so, it is guided by the UN's Sustainable Development Goals and the needs of Swiss industry and society. Its research focus areas are nano-structured materials and technologies, the built environment, energy, resources and emissions, and health and performance.
The change from materials testing to research institution is also reflected in the name: Since 1988, Empa has officially been called the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Testing and Research.
The public source identifies “Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology” as laboratory in Dübendorf, Switzerland. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Swiss, Federal and Laboratories.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Nov 23, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q683116. VIAF identifies the subject as 141404134. The Library of Congress control number is nr96022919. Authority coordinates are 47.402, 8.611. 2 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1880 and 1988.
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This entry incorporates text from “Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.