The University of Southampton is a world-leading public research university situated on the south coast of England in Hampshire, United Kingdom. Tracing its roots back to 1862 with the founding of the Hartley Institution, Southampton was the very first university to be granted a Royal Charter by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II in 1952. As a proud founding member of the prestigious Russell Group and the Science and Engineering South (SES) consortium, Southampton is celebrated globally as an engineering powerhouse, a pioneer in ocean and earth sciences, and the cradle of landmark breakthroughs that engineered the infrastructure of the modern internet—including the invention of the optical fibre amplifier (EDFA) at its Optoelectronics Research Centre and the professorship of World Wide Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee.