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DFG, ERC,KI erstellte Bilder - Copilot

A rising number of leaders of highly competitive third-party funded junior research groups choose the KIT as their host institution. In the past three years, 10 or more groups were acquired for the KIT each year, which is twice as much as the annual average in the preceding years. Besides promoting the research careers of junior researchers, this also diversifies the research profile of KIT. A crucial factor in this development is the early international recruitment of the best postdoctoral researchers via KIT’s Young Investigator Group Preparation Program. The junior research groups acquired in 2024 include a total of five groups in the Emmy Noether Program of the German Research Foundation (DFG), four Helmholtz Investigator Groups and one Nexus group of the Carl Zeiss Foundation.

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The Research Training Group RTG 3076 "Sustainable Hydrogels: From Chemical Structures to Applicability" will start in April 2025 under the leadership of Professor Dr. Mirko Bunzel and will examine the entire life cycle of sustainable hydrogels, from formation to ageing.

The Collaborative Research Center SFB 1441 with spokesperson Professor Dr. Jan-Dierk Grunwaldt is researching the holistic understanding of catalytic processes and will receive €12.5 million for four more years.

BMBF/PLS/Thilo Schoch

Gerhard Neumann is researching how robots can function better and better in real environments in his SMARTI³ (Scalable Manipulation Learning through AR-Enhanced Teleoperation enabling Intuitive Interactive Instructions) project. His project was successful in the 2024 round of the European Research Council's “Consolidator Grant”. He will receive around 2.4 million euros for his research over the next five years.

With this project, Neumann wants to improve for example, manipulating and interacting of robots with a variety of objects at the Institute of Anthropomatics and Robotics at KIT to perform complex tasks in real environments.

KIT

In the ranking of the most research-intensive universities in Germany, KIT is the best university in Germany without a medical faculty in terms of the total amount of third-party funding approved by the German Research Foundation (DFG).

In the field of chemistry, KIT once again took first place in terms of the amount of third-party funding approved by the DFG. In the natural sciences as a whole, KIT ranked 2nd in 2024 and 5th in the engineering sciences overall in terms of DFG approvals. 

In terms of the number of projects funded by the European Research Council (ERC), KIT achieved second place in the natural sciences and fourth place in the engineering sciences.

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With his research, Professor Christopher Barner-Kowollik is making it possible to develop high-precision materials and surfaces for specific applications in nanotechnology and materials development. The expert in macromolecular photochemistry has now been selected for the most highly endowed German research award (5 million euros for five years), an Alexander von Humboldt Professorship: from next year, he will be conducting research into new materials and polymer-based systems at KIT.

KIT

The European Research Council (ERC) funds Grohmann’s project GRAVITHELIUM on the development of a key technology for the Einstein Telescope (ET) with almost 3.4 million euros – the proposed next-generation European gravitational-wave detector. GRAVITHELIUM aims to push the sensitivity of cryogenic laser interferometers to fundamental limits using superfluid helium. This technology is expected to solve a central challenge in observing gravitational waves of the entire universe with ET.