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The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the Carl Zeiss Foundation have joined forces to promote and fund internationally recognised researchers from abroad. In the coming six years, the Humboldt Foundation will grant one Carl Zeiss-Humboldt Research Award every year. The award will be endowed by the Carl Zeiss Foundation. Each award comes with €100,000. It will honour the recipient’s overall accomplishments and acknowledge their exceptional potential.
The new award targets researchers working in science, technology, engineering or mathematics (STEM fields) who are seeking to collaborate with specialist colleagues in Baden-Württemberg, Rhineland-Palatinate or Thuringia, federal states in Germany which the Carl Zeiss Foundation supports and promotes. The Carl Zeiss-Humboldt Research Award will be awarded to researchers whose work has shaped their field even beyond their immediate research area and who have furthermore contributed to promoting diversity in the STEM domain.
“Thanks to additional funding, our collaboration with the Carl Zeiss Foundation is enabling us to recognise and honour more leading international researchers. This pleases us greatly”, said Enno Aufderheide, Secretary General of the Humboldt Foundation. “We consider it very important to make a targeted contribution to increasing diversity − not only in terms of gender distribution, but also with regard to aspects like social background and regional origin − especially in STEM disciplines”, Aufderheide added.
“We are very pleased that we can now make working in the federal states we promote even more attractive for top international researchers through the Carl Zeiss-Humboldt Research Award. Interregional collaboration strengthens Germany’s standing as a location for conducting research”, said Felix Streiter, Managing Director of the Carl Zeiss Foundation.
Individuals are nominated and selected for the Carl Zeiss-Humboldt Research Award through the Humboldt Research Award programme. Direct nominations are not possible. Besides receiving the award and €100,000 in funding for their work, Carl Zeiss-Humboldt Award winners are also invited to conduct a research project of their own choosing in Germany in collaboration with specialist colleagues there. €50,000 in extra funding will be made available to further finance this collaboration. This funding can be used, for example, for attending specialist conferences, for child care, equipment and to include young researchers in the collaborative work.
(Press release 23/2022)
About the Carl-Zeiss-Stiftung
The Carl-Zeiss-Stiftung’s mission is to create an open environment for scientific breakthroughs. As a partner of excellence in science, it supports basic research as well as applied sciences in the STEM subject areas (science, technology, engineering and mathematics). Founded in 1889 by the physicist and mathematician Ernst Abbe, the Carl-Zeiss-Stiftung is one of the oldest and biggest private science funding institutions in Germany. It is the sole owner of Carl Zeiss AG and SCHOTT AG. Its projects are financed from the dividend distributions of the two foundation companies.
Every year, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation enables more than 2,000 researchers from all over the world to spend time conducting research in Germany. The Foundation maintains an interdisciplinary network of well over 30,000 Humboldtians in more than 140 countries around the world – including 61 Nobel Prize winners.