University of Stuttgart installs 12 new tenure-track professorships in the framework of its future strategy

The tenure-track professorship is being comprehensively established at German universities with a new Federal-Länder program. The Federal Government is making one billion Euros available from 2017 in order to sponsor 1000 additional tenure-track professorships. The tenure-track professorship envisages the direct transition to a lifelong professorship after a successful probation period. The Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) announced the results of the initial approval round on 21^st September: accordingly the University of Stuttgart will receive funds for setting up 12 tenure-track professorships.

Professor Wolfram Ressel, Rector of the University of Stuttgart, was delighted about the decision made by the selection committee and emphasized: “With the approved funding of 12 tenure-track professorships, we now have the opportunity to pursue our strategic targets in the promotion of young researchers and personnel development in a sustainable manner. We will create reliability, transparency and calculability of career paths for young scientists and at the same time will be able to dynamically promote the overall university strategy.“

Professor Ressel announced that the University of Stuttgart was pursuing other ambitious goals by systematically establishing the tenure-track professorship. For example, the University will be successively setting up and filling a further ten tenure-track professorships during the course of the funding program until 2030 using its own funds. Professor Ressel said: “With the successful participation in the Federal-Länder program, we will not only be strengthening young scientists and being able to offer them an early professorship but also be implementing the tenure-track professorship as a new career path across all faculties of the University. We will also emphatically use the opportunity associated with this of promoting the content-related profiling and the associated structural formation of the University of Stuttgart.“ This will make a particularly effective contribution to the strategic goal of interlinked disciplines at the University of Stuttgart, according to Professor Ressel.