The Leibniz Association connects 97 independent research institutions that range in focus from natural, engineering and environmental sciences to economics, spatial and social sciences and the humanities. The Leibniz Institutes employ around 20,500 people, including 11,500 researchers. The financial volume amounts to 2 billion euros.
The Leibniz Association has significantly increased its efforts to establish strategic cooperation with Israeli partners. The cooperation of individual Leibniz Institutes with Israel is long-standing and successful. Activities include joint workshops and seminars as well as joint publications and project proposals. There are both institutionalized forms of collaborations with memoranda of understanding and exchange formats based on direct networking between researchers.
For 2021, the Leibniz Association reported around 80 collaborations with Israeli partners and around 25 researchers from Israel at its institutes.
Following a delegation trip covering a wide range of disciplines, workshops were held in Israel in fall 2015 and in Berlin in February 2016 by Leibniz Institutes and Israeli partners in key areas of cooperation (e.g. marine and geological research, archaeology). In 2018, a Leibniz workshop in Jerusalem was dedicated to the topics of nutrition-related diseases and neurosciences, in 2019 a workshop in Leipzig focused on historical content and in 2022 a workshop was held in Jerusalem on the topic of ‘Post Corona: Smart Photonic and Molecular Technologies to Combat Infectious Diseases’.
The German Research Foundation (DFG) funds the first German-Israeli Research Training Group in the humanities – with the Leibniz Association playing a key role. Its funding will raise the collaborative promotion of early career scholars by the three partner institutions, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Leipzig University, and the Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture – Simon Dubnow, to a new level. The approved Research Training Group will focus on Jewish material culture in modernity.