Ranking DFG Funding Atlas: Universität Heidelberg among the Institutions with Highest Grants
12 December 2024
Ruperto Carola ranks first Germany-wide in the field of natural sciences
Heidelberg University is represented in the current Funding Atlas of the German Research Foundation (DFG) as one of the German universities with the highest DFG grants and, specifically, takes top position among the natural sciences. According to this report, Ruperto Carola ranks fourth in Germany with a total of 307.5 million euros approved for the years 2020 to 2022. In a comparison of the academic fields, the natural sciences come out on top, with the life sciences at Ruperto Carola ranking third. In the evaluation of the regional research profiles, Heidelberg / Mannheim is identified as a particularly strong DFG region.
Among the top five universities with the highest DFG grants, Heidelberg University comes out behind Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU), the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and RWTH Aachen University and ahead of Freie Universität Berlin. Ruperto Carola is one of the most consistently top-ranking universities, as demonstrated by separate evaluations in the DFG Funding Atlas. With regard to the regional research profiles, the German Research Foundation reports that the “Lower Neckar” region with Heidelberg and Mannheim (411.7 million euros) has the third largest funding volume, after Berlin (921.7 million euros) and Munich (816.1 million euros).
For the natural sciences, the university is ahead of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and TUM with DFG grants of 82.9 million euros. In the life sciences, Ruperto Carola is in third place behind LMU and the University of Freiburg, with a reported 168 million euros in grants. In the humanities and social sciences, Heidelberg University takes 14th place, reporting 33.3 million euros in funding from the German Research Foundation.
An overview of federal states shows that around 1.7 billion euros in DFG funding went to universities and non-university research institutions in Baden-Württemberg. The Funding Atlas covers the DFG funding instruments of individual funding, coordinated programs, the Excellence Strategy of the federal and state governments, as well as infrastructure funding. With this tenth volume of reports, the German Research Foundation, as Germany’s largest research funding organization, has been publishing “key figures relating to publicly financed research in Germany” every three years since 1997. The figures and data basis of the current edition, published at the end of November 2024, covers the reporting period from 2020 to 2022. It focuses on the topic of internationalization of research and, under the heading “Topics, Trends, and Innovations”, provides a retrospective on ten editions of the DFG Funding Atlas.