the secrets of Germany’s scientific reputation

In 2019, shortly after finishing her master's degree at Nanjing University in China, Xinyi Zhao opened an email and learned that she had been offered a PhD position at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany. “When I told my parents about this, they asked me to double-check whether the offer was real, since they were not familiar with the institute.” But Zhao knew about his brilliant scientific reputation. “I was very excited, but also quite surprised,” says Zhao. “I hear they are doing amazing research.” Six years later, she is still happily working in Germany, working as a postdoc at Berlin's Max Planck Institute for Human Development.

Outdoor career guide: Germany

Between 2012 and 2022, the number of foreign scientists at the country's four largest non-university research organizations doubled, from 8,115 to 16,625.¹. These institutes—the Max Planck Society, the Leibniz Association, the Helmholtz Association of German Research Centers and the Fraunhofer Society—were ranked among the world's 20 largest non-profit organizations based on research results in 2025, according to Nature Index Research Leaders. The country's universities also maintain a strong international profile, with 8 of them ranked among the world's top 100, as reported by Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2026.

Germany's success in academic performance rankings is partly due to the structure of its scientific ecosystem, in which each research organization specializes in a particular type of science, and a remarkably stable stream of government research funding. “Germany is a country without natural resources,” says Othmar Whistler, former president of the Helmholtz Association. “We don't have cheap labor. All we have is the brains of our people.” As a result, he adds, “the German government is really committed to promoting research and innovation.”

Optimized systems

In 2023, about 3.1% of Germany's gross domestic product (GDP) – approximately €132 billion ($152 billion) – was spent on research and development, lower than Israel (6%) and the US (3.4%) but higher than the relative research expenditures of the UK (2.6%) and China (2.7%). About a third of this spending was in the public sector and the rest in the private sector. The German government's support for science has remained stable under various political leaders. Over the past 20 years, “we haven’t had a year where federal spending has been cut,” says Max Vogler, vice president of Global Strategic Networks for Germany, Austria and Switzerland at the Amsterdam-based academic publisher Elsevier, who co-authored a report on Germany’s research system earlier this year.².

While the bulk of funding for research and teaching in countries such as France and the UK comes from central governments, in Germany the task of supporting academic activities falls on both the federal and state governments. They collectively provide the majority of institutional funding for most of the country's non-university research organizations. And unlike the US and UK, where universities receive most of their revenue from tuition fees, German states are responsible for providing basic funding for universities.

Funding flows into a highly structured research ecosystem consisting of more than 420 universities, most of which are public, and four major non-university research organizations. Each of the four performs a specific specialized task, says Rainer Fritsch, a specialist in scientific and innovation research at the Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research. The Max Planck Society, for example, is dedicated to basic research, and each of its 84 institutes across the country specializes in a different area, such as animal behavior and neurogenetics. The institutes of the Leibniz Society strive to integrate scientific knowledge into society by providing economic reports and providing museums that conduct research and report the results. The Helmholtz Association centers house some of the largest research equipment in the country, including the world's largest artificial sun, used in the study of solar processes.

Meanwhile, the 75 institutes of the Fraunhofer Society have the special task of carrying out applied research; for example, researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems in Freiburg are developing more efficient solar cells, and scientists at the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Technology and Advanced Materials, which has several centers throughout Germany, are developing innovative non-stick coatings for food processing tools. Some of the society's projects are implemented and funded by industry partners. Many countries, including France, Britain and China, have tried to emulate Fraunhofer's model in one form or another, but Fritsch says it works best in the German research landscape. “Fraunhofer is so successful because the whole system is structured the way it is,” he says: the clear division of tasks between research organizations effectively avoids duplication.

Despite their differences in their activities, universities and non-university research organizations in Germany are not isolated from each other, says Vogler; universities often collaborate with nearby non-university institutions. In 2005, in part to encourage collaboration, federal and state governments launched the Excellence Initiative, which includes funding for interdisciplinary research projects at clusters of institutions.

From 2026 to 2032, the initiative, now called the “Strategy for Excellence,” allocated €539 million per year to 70 “clusters of excellence” projects across the country. One of them is the Cardiopulmonary Cluster of Excellence in Hesse, which brings together researchers from Goethe University in Frankfurt, Justus Liebig University in Giessen and the Max Planck Institute for Heart and Lung Research in Bad Nauheim to study heart and lung diseases. By facilitating the exchange of expertise between research organizations, “suddenly the whole becomes much greater than the sum of its parts,” says Vogler.

Discovery support

According to Whistler, during discussions of the European Union's science funding programs, some member states expressed a desire to invest mainly in applied research. But German officials defend the need to focus on basic “blue sky” research – work for which practical applications are not immediately obvious. Enrico Schleiff, president of Goethe University Frankfurt, attributes the emphasis on basic research to the fact that freedom of science is a constitutional right in Germany, allowing scientists to determine the direction of their research without government or political influence—which he says has led to many fruitful discoveries.

Some of these important discoveries include the development of blinatumomab, the first T-cell activating drug that induces patients' immune cells to attack leukemia cells. More recently, scientists at Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg were part of a team that discovered that these and other cancer immunotherapies can also be used to target dysfunctional, body-attacking immune cells responsible for causing autoimmune diseases such as lupus. “The whole world is now developing T-cell attractants,” says Patrick Bauerle, a biotech entrepreneur and co-founder and chief scientific adviser of Cullinan Therapeutics, a Cambridge, Mass., company that licensed a T-cell-attracting drug from a Chinese biotech firm in June.

One of Germany's long-standing weaknesses is that its research products are rarely commercialized in the country because it lacks the startup culture and abundant sources of venture capital funding that support the biotech scene in countries such as the United States and Israel, Wiestler said. This is partly why the Helmholtz Association, for example, is increasingly partnering with companies to translate its findings into marketable products. One example is the creation in 2023 of the innovation platform Solar TAP – a joint venture between several Helmholtz Centers and industry partners to develop innovative solar technologies – and the Joint Innovation Laboratory – a collaboration between the German Cancer Research Center and the Hamburg skin care company Beiersdorf to develop strategies for preventing skin cancer.