The TU9 alliance
The nine leading technical universities in Germany are grouped under the label TU9. They are among the most research-intensive universities in Germany: these TUs lead the field when it comes to raising third-party funding – close to 1.9 billion euros in the year 2021 – this being almost one third of all third-party funding for universities. The nine top-class TUs receive more than a fifth of all DFG funding, the DFG being the biggest source of research funding for universities and non-university research institutions in Germany. In the engineering sciences, nearly half of DFG funding goes to TU9 universities. It is no surprise then that five of these universities are among Germany’s universities of excellence and represent 21 of the 57 excellence clusters under the German Excellence Strategy.
Another is RWTH Aachen University, which regularly tops the ranking in terms of third-party funding per university professor in Germany. In 2022, it raised almost 490 million euros from third parties for its 1.2 billion euro budget. The specialist research fields at this internationally renowned university, which maintains three clusters of excellence, encompass synthetic fuels, data mining, computer science, production technology, high-performance materials, health, renewable resources and mobility.
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