Max Planck Society

The Max-Planck-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften Eingetragener Verein (abbreviated MPG, Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science in English) is an independent non-profit association of German research institutes funded by the federal and state governments.

The nearly 80 research institutes of the Max Planck Society conduct basic research in the interest of the general public in the natural sciences, life sciences, social sciences, and the arts and humanities. They have a total staff of approx. 13,000 permanent employees, including 4,700 scientists, plus around 11,000 non-tenured scientists and guests. Their budget for 2006 was about 1.4 billion euro, with 84% from state and federal funds. The Max Planck Institutes focus on excellence in research, with 17 Nobel Prizes awarded to their scientists since 1948, and are generally regarded as the foremost basic research organization in Germany.

Other notable networks of publicly funded research institutes in Germany are the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, performing applied research with a focus on industrial collaborations, the Helmholtz-Gesellschaft, a network of the national laboratories in Germany, and the Leibniz-Gemeinschaft, a loose network of institutes performing basic to applied research.

This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA