Facts and Figures

Funding and costs

The total Helmholtz Association budget amounts to around €2.8 billion. A good two thirds of this funding comes from public sponsors (in a 9:1 split between Federal and Länder authorities). The individual Helmholtz Centres are responsible for attracting the remaining 30% themselves in the form of contract funding provided by public and private sector sponsors (see download section to the right).

Staff

Since 1st January 2009 the number of staff has risen to 30.000. In 2008 the Helmholtz Association employed 27,913 staff. 9,043 staff were scientists.

Please note that the table (see downloads) does not count individuals but rather person years, an abstract value which records the calculated number or work hours across all staff. Core-funded work hours stand for the staff paid for by programme-oriented funding.

Activities

The Helmholtz Association concentrates its resources within specific programmes where it carries out top-class research in six research fields. These are Energy, Earth and Environment, Health, Key Technologies, Structure of Matter plus Transport and Space.

• The Association's scientific research work produces 12,104 scientific publications - 7,623 of it in ISI cited journals (2008)  
• The research fields annually attract contract funding worth between €600m and €900m for their scientific research work.

The Helmholtz Association aims to provide outstanding minds with excellent conditions for creative work.

• Each year, several thousand visiting scientists and researchers from all around the world come to the Helmholtz Centres, not least to work on the large-scale scientific facilities and instrumentation which these Centres have; in some cases, this equipment is the only one of its kind in the world. In 2008 alone, more than 4,176 foreign scientists came to the Helmholtz Centres to do research. 
• Helmholtz gives young scientists the opportunity to work in major teams of international researchers and to use the high-performance research infrastructure for their projects. Helmholtz enables some 4,400 doctoral students to gain further qualifications at the research centres and to work independently at an early stage.

Helmholtz transfers scientific knowledge into innovation and on into the market and so contributes to creating the technological basis for a competitive society.

• 400 granted patents every year
• 37 spin-offs from the Helmholtz Centres for the last four years
• about 440 signed licence agreements per year
• 2,400 collaborative projects with industry 

illustrate the Helmholtz Association's commitment.