Max Planck Society



         


The Max-Planck-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften e.V. (abbreviated MPG, meaning Max Planck society for the advancement of science) is a network of elite scientific research institutes in Germany. The MPG is named after Max Planck, the famous German physicist who initiated quantum mechanics. It is the successor of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft (Emperor William Society) which took the role the MPG has now in pre-war Germany. The society's logo features Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom.

Today the MPG comprises of 80 institutes, all called "Max Planck-Institut (MPI) für (for) ..." which are distributed all over Germany (and in serveral other countries) and cover many fields of fundamental scientific research. The institutes have a total staff of approx. 12,000 permanent employees plus around 9,000 scientists working there only temporally.

The society is organised as an eingetragener Verein (basically a private non-profit organisation), but is chiefly run from public money (50% from the national government's research ministry, 50% from the state governments). Its budget for 2004 was about 1,250 million euro, with 95% supplied by state and especially federal governments of Germany and 5% by donations and earnings.

Max Planck institutes often cooperate closely with the universities nearby, but are independent of them (and, as stated above, funded partially by the national government, while universities are run exclusively by the states). This allows their staff to concentrate on research, without teaching obligations. The Max-Planck-Instituts are also better equipped and funded than university research departments, and hence world-leading scientific institutions.

Apart from the institutes, there are the International Max Planck Research Schools, Independent Junior Research Groups and other facilities.

Other notable networks of publicly funded research institutes in Germany are the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft and the Helmholtz-Gesellschaft.

The MPG's website is http://www.mpg.de

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Max Planck Institutes

Here is a list of the institutes, the names translated into English:






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