International researchers are drawn to Berlin

Berlin (dpa / d.de) – According to an analysis by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the major university cities of Berlin and Munich continue to attract the largest numbers of foreign academics. The current “Humboldt Ranking” involved an analysis of data on 6,500 guest stays at German universities and non-university research institutions that were sponsored by the Foundation. According to the survey covering the past four years, most foreign Humboldt Fellows conducted research at the Free University of Berlin (251 researchers), the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (226), the Humboldt University of Berlin (236) and the Technical University of Munich (171). After these, the most commonly visited universities were Heidelberg, Göttingen, Cologne, Münster, Frankfurt am Main and Tübingen.

In terms of the relation between the number of foreign researchers and the size of the university, a particularly large number of academics from abroad also work at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and the University of Konstanz. Engineers and scientists from other countries are especially attracted to Munich, humanities scholars to Berlin, and biology and chemistry researchers to Heidelberg. Apart from universities, the institutes of the Max Planck Society are particularly popular, as are the research institution Forschungszentrum Jülich and two Helmholtz Centers.