Promoting cooperation
The Helmholtz Association is pursuing innovative paths in the Initiative for Excellence and with the funding instruments of the Initiative and Networking Fund, in order to intermesh the universities with the centres even more closely in terms of content and organisation. The new funding line of Helmholtz Alliances also contributes particularly to this. An outstanding example is provided by the Helmholtz Alliance on “Physics at the Terascale” that was approved in May 2007. Under the group leadership of DESY, this alliance unites the key activities performed by the German particle physics community in connection with the experiments that are now beginning on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, Geneva. In turn, this gives the German institutions a united front in their work on the international stage. Besides DESY, the other group members are the Research Center Karlsruhe, a Max Planck Institute and 17 universities.
The Helmholtz Association’s Virtual Institutes represent a special form of cooperation in which scientists and researchers join up with each other to form multi-locational and cross-institutional teams that then collaboratively address research topics, supported by start-up funding from the Initiative and Networking Fund of between 250,000 and 300,000 euros per year over a term of three years. A substantial proportion of these funds benefit the participating universities. Ten new Virtual Institutes were founded in 2006. This means that a total of 77 such collaborations have been funded by the Helmholtz Association since 2003, when the first call for proposals for this funding programme was announced. That such investments do pay off has been confirmed by the express willingness of partners to continue the cooperation, even beyond the end of the Helmholtz funding term.
More about international projects
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More about Helmholtz-Vituelle institutes
More about Helmholtz-EOS
