Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften

At present the Academy runs 22 ongoing research projects involving 190 staff members. The range of these projects is wide indeed. The academic responsibility for the individual projects lies with supervisory Commissions made up of Academy members and external experts. In its work the Academy concentrates on long-term basic research. Among the scientific projects exemplifying this approach is a Research Project working on the reconstruction of climatic fluctuations in the course of the history of the Earth, while another is concerned with the provision of tectonic stress maps of the Earth’s crust in its present state. In the humanities the Academy contributes to the preservation of our cultural heritage with a variety of projects including critical editions of the works and correspondence of major thinkers and the compilation of a number of dictionaries satisfying the most exacting lexicographic standards. In this way the Academy supplies a reliable fund of knowledge that can be drawn upon by other scholars and scientists active in a research or teaching capacity and by the public. As a state institution the Heidelberg Academy is funded primarily by the state of Baden-Wurttemberg. For several of its research projects it also draws on financial resources made available by the „Academy Programme“ run jointly by the Federal Government and the German states. In these cases the costs for the projects in question are shouldered equally by the Federal Government and the states where the projects are undertaken. In addition, the Academy’s Research Projects apply for external funding from priority programmes run by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, the German Research Foundation and other foundations. At present the Academy budget totals approx. 8.5 million euros, 4.9 million coming from the state of Baden-Wuerttemberg, 2.4 million from the Federal Government and 1.2 million from external funding.