Seven Tenure Track Professorships

From signaling mechanisms in plant development through Northern American philology to empirical economic research: a total of seven academics will be researching and teaching on new Tenure Track professorships at the University of Freiburg. This was confirmed by the selection panel for the Tenure Track program in the second round.

Tenure Track professorships supported by the Federal Government-Länder Programme of the Federal Ministry for Education and Research are targeted towards post-docs in the early stages of their career, and after a successful trial phase lead directly to a tenured professorship. The University of Freiburg is a pioneer among German universities as regards the establishment of this career path: it introduced Tenure Track professorships in 2009 and so was nationally one of the early adopters of this career model for the funding of young academics. In the first round of the program, the University of Freiburg received twelve Tenure Track professorships in 2017. It had applied for 19, however twelve was the maximum number of posts that could be approved at that time under the quota system for the Federal States. In the second round, all universities were able to reapply for any professorships which had not made the cut the first time. In the latest decision, the University of Freiburg has had all the posts it requested approved.

“The Tenure Track offers promising talent a reliable, performance-related path to a professorship,” says Rector Prof. Dr. Hans-Jochen Schiewer. “That makes this model an attractive career option for young researchers. Universities can use it to raise their profiles in the international competition for the best junior academics. We recognized this potential at an early stage in Freiburg, and have made use of it. Key figures clearly show that today we are among the German universities with the highest performing and most creative young academics.”

For every Tenure Track professorship the university receives an annual sum of 118,045 euros. This includes a “strategy supplement” of 15 percent, which the university can use to develop further measures to fund young talent. The funding in the second round begins on 1^st December 2019 and ends at the latest in 2032. The universities must fill the Tenure Track professorships until 2022. They have a six-year term, or in the event of birth or adoption of children up to eight years. Once an academic has been successfully evaluated, they are transferred to a permanent professorship and receive the annual sum for a further two years.

In the whole of Germany, the University of Freiburg is one of the universities with the strongest academics at an early stage of their careers. This can be seen from the leading positions taken on major programs for the funding of young researchers. In the period 2014 to 2018, the University of Freiburg held second place in Germany for funding from the Heisenberg program of the German Research Foundation (DFG), third place for Starting Grants from the European Research Council (ERC) and first place for Emmy Noether groups and Heinz Maier-Leibnitz prizes from the DFG.

Background information

Press Release of the Joint Science Conference (GWK – Gemeinsame Wissenschaftskonferenz) on the Federal Government-Länder Programme for the funding of junior academics

In 2014 the League of European Research Universities (LERU) under the aegis of the University of Freiburg published a position paper on the subject of Tenure Track, to highlight the structural background.

Freiburg Career Advancement