UA Ruhr impresses in the DFG Funding Atlas 2024

Developments at the three partner universities
Ruhr University Bochum has once again climbed up the DFG's funding atlas, continuing its steady positive development. In terms of public research funding, it moved up two places to 16th place. If you look at the funding awarded in the four major subject areas of humanities and social sciences, life sciences, natural sciences and engineering sciences, Ruhr-Universität is among the top ten in three of these four areas. In total, Ruhr University Bochum raised around 220 million euros in DFG funding between 2020 and 2022.

As the smallest of the three partners in the UA Ruhr, TU Dortmund University raised €108 million in DFG funding during the survey period. This is 15 percent more than in the 2021 Funding Atlas (2017-2019). In terms of the third-party funding that TU Dortmund University acquired from the DFG from 2020 to 2022, the university ranks 35th out of more than 200 universities nationwide. TU Dortmund University is particularly strong in the engineering sciences, which include mechanical engineering, computer science, electrical engineering and civil engineering. Around half of TU Dortmund University's DFG funding is allocated to this scientific field. In the field of mechanical and production engineering, TU Dortmund University continues to hold a place in the top ten with 5th place.

Compared to the previous Funding Atlas 2021, the University of Duisburg-Essen (UDE) has risen from 23rd to 22nd place: its researchers acquired almost 175 million euros in funding from the DFG in the period 2020 to 2022. UDE is thus continuing the extremely positive trend that was documented in the 2021 Funding Atlas, when it showed by far the greatest change of all universities, moving up from 31st place in 2018 to 23rd place.

Successes in the natural sciences in particular
All three partner universities have improved, particularly in the natural sciences. Here, Ruhr-Universität rose significantly from 16th to tenth place. Such rises to these top ranks are rare, as the previous good ranking is already based on a high DFG funding volume.

TU Dortmund University also improved in the natural sciences, increasing its DFG funding by 23% compared to the previous survey period and climbing eight places to 29th place in the indicator of third-party funding per professorship.

The DFG particularly highlights the rise of the natural sciences at the University of Duisburg-Essen from 29th to 23rd place and emphasizes as particularly noteworthy that the UDE “had already risen nine places in the natural sciences in the last ranking.” In a personnel-relative presentation, in which the volume of third-party funding is set in relation to the scientific staff of the corresponding subject area, UDE even ranks 4th in the natural sciences.

The Ruhr region is very popular with international engineering scientists: between 2018 and 2022, 58 scholarship holders from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation were guests at the UA Ruhr.

Joining forces for the Excellence Strategy
The current Funding Atlas shows that the launch of the Excellence Initiative in 2009 has led to a concentration effect at the top of the rankings. In order to benefit more from the funding of the Excellence competition, the three partners of the UA Ruhr have joined forces and, if possible, want to compete together as an Excellence Alliance in 2025. Back in 2015, the DFG published a “heat map” in its funding atlas at the time, which identified the Ruhr region as a particularly strong research region in Germany.