The University of Notre Dame  is a private Catholic research university located in Notre Dame, Indiana, USA, just north of the city of South Bend.

It was founded by Father Edward Sorin, CSC, who was also the school's first president. It was established as an all-male institution on November 26, 1842 on land donated by the Bishop of Vincennes. The university first enrolled women undergraduates in 1972. Today, about 47 percent of the student body is female. Notre Dame's Catholic heritage is evident in the architecture around campus, manifested by the ornate Basilica of the Sacred Heart, together with numerous chapels and religious iconography.

The university today is organized into five colleges and one professional school, the oldest of which, the College of Arts and Letters, began awarding degrees in 1849. The undergraduate program was ranked 20th among national universities by U.S. News & World Report for 2009-2010. Notre Dame has a comprehensive graduate program with 32 master's and 25 doctoral degree programs.Additionally, the university's library system is one of the 100 largest in the United States.

More than 80% of the university's 8,000 undergraduates live on campus in one of 29 single-sex residence halls, each of which fields teams for more than a dozen intramural sports. Notre Dame's approximately 120,000 alumni are located around the world.

Outside academe, Notre Dame is best known for its sports programs, especially its football team. The teams are members of the NCAA Division I, and are known collectively as the Fighting Irish, a name it adopted in the 1920s. The football team, an Independent, has accumulated eleven national championships, seven Heisman Trophy winners, and sixty-two members in the College Football Hall of Fame. Other ND teams have accumulated 14 national championships, chiefly in the Big East Conference.

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