Nancy has a rich historic and cultural heritage, where classical style Place Stanislas (UNESCO World Heritage) neighbors the medieval Old Town and early XXth century Art Nouveau and crystal artwork. You will certainly enjoy one of Nancy’s museums and may attend a concert of opera during your stay.

Nancy is built on the Jurassic rocks of the eastern part of the Paris Basin, close to the Vosges Variscan massif, where significant copper and silver mining activities occurs as early as the 16th century. Coal and iron were also mined in Lorraine during a large part of the 19th and 20th century; salt and quarry activities exists nowadays in the region. A small petroleum discovery was also made in the 1970s only 30 km south of Nancy. 1h west of Nancy, in Bure, the National Nuclear Waste Agency (ANDRA) has set up an underground research lab, 500 meters below the surface, which is now open to the scientific community to underground experiments in low-permeability shale rocks.

This strong applied geology activity led to the Creation of the Institute of Applied Geology in 1908, probably also motivated by geopolitical pressure (the North of Lorraine was then German). The Institute became the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Géologie in 1948. This tradition of applied geology has led Nancy to become a leading teaching and research center in key aspects of the Geosciences, both at the national and international scale. Today, Nancy is considered as a major geosciences center at the national level, hosting 4 major laboratories in natural resources (GeoRessources), geochemistry and Petrography (CRPG), Environmental and soil sciences (LIEC and LSE), gathering about 300 permanent researchers. Through this long history in quantitative geology, Nancy has been active in mathematical geosciences for many decades. It hosts one of oldest IAMG student chapters.

Nancy is also a major university city in France. The Université de Lorraine, created in 2013, counts 60,000 students in all disciplines, 40,000 of which study in Nancy. In addition to geosciences, Mathematics is an important academic domain of the university, which hosts the renowned Institut Elie Cartan.