The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (U-M or U of M) is a coeducational public research university in Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States. Karen DeGroot and Gerald DeGroot were doctoral candidates at the university when they established the DHARMA Initiative in 1970 with funding from the Hanso Foundation. (Swan Orientation film)

The DHARMA Initiative was headquartered in Ann Arbor, Michigan; Daniel Faraday worked there from 1974 to 1977. ("The Variable") It has not been established if the DHARMA Initiative was headquartered at the university.

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Trivia

The University of Michigan is widely regarded in academia as a leader in quantitative methods in social science, focused around the Institute for Social Research (ISR). [2] The thrust of the "Michigan approach" is to look for empirical, quantifiable approaches to understanding social and psychological phenomena that were hitherto studied using more "soft" techniques.

At the time of the Dharma Initiative's founding, the University of Michigan had a number of significant defense research efforts housed at the Willow Run Laboratories. These classified projects were spun off in 1972 to the Environmental Research Institute of Michigan (ERIM), which subsequently had a long and profitable history as an innovator in radar and other forms of remote sensing technologies in which mathematics and mathematicians played an essential role. ERIM's assets were sold and the organization essentially went out of business only a few years after the Purge.