Heidelberg University

Overview

Heidelberg University

Heidelberg University is a public research university in Heidelberg, Baden-Württemberg, Germany. It was established in 1386 through Pope Urban IV. Its official name is the Ruprecht Karl University of Heidelberg or Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg in German. The third university founded during the days of the Roman Empire, it is the oldest university in Germany and one of the oldest surviving institutions of higher learning in the world. It is ranked number one in Germany and 42nd globally.

Heidelberg University Key Statistics

The university has 12 faculties and offers degree programs in over 100 disciplines at the undergraduate, graduate, and post-doctoral levels. The faculties include the Faculty of Physics and Astronomy, Faculty of BioSciences, and the Faculty of Law.

Heidelberg University has a total of 28,649 students, including undergraduates and postgraduates. It also employs 8,377 administrative staff and 6,072 academic staff. The university has three campuses, namely, the Old Town Campus, the New Campus, and Burgheim Campus.

The university’s library contains approximately 3.2 million books, 500,000 other media, such as microfilms and videotapes, and 10,732 scientific periodicals. It also has 6,600 manuscripts on display, including the Codex Manesse, 1,800 incunabula, 110,500 autographs, and an ancient map, painting, and picture collection.

Other Heidelberg University key statistics include 699 Erasmus arrangements with European universities and partnerships with 27 countries abroad. It has also produced a wealth of prominent and influential personalities, including 11 Nobel laureates and 19 Leibniz awardees.

Heidelberg University Research

Heidelberg is committed to its systematic research university plan. The university receives research grants from the German Research Foundation, the European Research Council, and third parties, such as the State of Baden-Württemberg. In 2019, it received 460.2 million euros in state grants.

Its top three research fields are medicine, physics, and biology. The university's researchers' works have been published in The Lancet, Nature, and The New England Journal of Medicine. The top conferences where the university's researchers have presented papers/attended are Web Science, Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, and Meeting of the Association of Computer Linguistics.

The most cited research output produced by researchers at Heidelberg University is Aad et al.’s (2012) “Observation of a new particle in the search for the Standard Model Higgs Boson with the ATLAS detector at the LHC,” published in Physics Letters B. This paper received 19,697 citations. The second most cited article is Ade et al.’s (2016) “Planck 2015 results - XIII. Cosmological parameters.” This article was published in Astronomy and Astrophysics and has generated 17,560 citations. The third is Amsler et al.’s (1996) “Review of Particle Physics,” published in Physics Letters B. This paper received 16,007 citations.

The university has 27 collaborative research centers and 10 research training groups. Some of these centers are the Center for Advanced Materials, the Center for Molecular Biology of Heidelberg University, and the Center for Organismal Studies.

The Heidelberg University Hospital is part of the National Center for Tumor Diseases (NCT) Heidelberg, a collaborative research facility operated by the university with the German Cancer Aid and the German Cancer Research Center.