Teaching and research: history and future prospects

No other region in Europe has as high a concentration of scientific, academic, and research facilities as Berlin. Berlin invests around ¤1.8 billion annually in science, academics, and research. More than 50,000 people teach, do research, and work at the city’s four universities, three art colleges, seven other institutions of higher education, an international business school, and over 70 non-university publicly financed research institutes. The Charité university hospital, affiliated with both the Free University (Freie Universität) and the Humboldt University, is Europe’s largest medical school. And science and industry cooperate closely at the two technology parks in Adlershof and Berlin-Buch.

Germany’s national research organizations are represented in Berlin with a number of institutes, as are eight federal ministry research facilities. Top researchers from Berlin’s four universities and its non-university research institutions will be working together under the aegis of the new foundation “Einstein-Stiftung-Berlin.”
Freie Universität Berlin was singled out as one of Germany’s “universities of excellence” by the federal and state “Initiative for Excellence.”