Mainz – a hub of science
When it comes to Mainz as a science hub, the State of Rhineland-Palatinate and JGU have put together a strategy that has delivered some solid achievements. Since 2007, the number of research institutes based in the vicinity of JGU and co-financed by the federal government has tripled. The following non-university institutions engaged in top-level research are located either directly on the JGU campus or within a radius of just a few kilometers of the university.
- Fraunhofer Institute for Microengineering and Microsystems IMM
- Helmholtz Institute for Translational Oncology Mainz (HI-TRON Mainz)
- Helmholtz Institute Mainz (HIM)
- Institut für Biotechnologie und Wirkstoff-Forschung (IBWF)
- Institute of Molecular Biology (IMB)
- Leibniz Institute for Resilience Research (LIR)
- Leibniz Institute of European History (IEG)
- Leibniz-Zentrum für Archäologie (LEIZA)
- Max Planck Institute for Chemistry
- Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research
These, together with JGU and other research institutes in Mainz and its surroundings have come together to form the Mainz Research Alliance – including the Academy of Sciences and Literature Mainz and the research-driven BioNTech and Boehringer Ingelheim pharmaceutical companies. Under the umbrella of the Mainz Research Alliance, the Mainz Campus Research Council (MCRC) was founded in 2020 to intensify strategic cooperation and joint activities in research.
The Rhine-Main Universities
The members of the Rhine-Main Universities (RMU) strategic alliance include JGU, Goethe University Frankfurt am Main and Technical University of Darmstadt. With their more than 100,000 students and roughly 1,500 professors, these three closely situated institutes of higher education cooperate in the areas of research, learning and teaching. As prominent research-led institutions, they have made the Rhine-Main region into an integrated and globally visible research hub.
The FORTHEM Alliance
JGU and its six partner universities that form the FORTHEM European University Alliance have been receiving support from the EU Commission since 2019 to help make their concept of establishing a "European university" a reality. FORTHEM is an acronym for Fostering Outreach within European Regions, Transnational Higher Education and Mobility. Together, the partners are working towards developing and enhancing the European higher education landscape by putting in place a European campus network that has as its starting point a variety of bi- and trinational agreements between the participating universities. By 2025 it hopes to merge the various mobility accords, research programs, and dual and multiparty arrangements of the partner universities into a joint Transnational Higher Education Strategy and then deploy it across the alliance as a whole.
JGU is the coordinating university of the FORTHEM Alliance; other members include the Université de Bourgogne in France, the Uniwersytet Opolski in Poland, the Universitat de València in Spain – already long-term partners – to which the Universita' degli Studi di Palermo in Italy, the Latvijas Universitāte and the Jyväskylän yliopisto in Finland have been added.
Through the project FIT FORTHEM (short for "Fostering Institutional Transformation of R&I Policies in European Universities"), FORTHEM is evolving comprehensive alliance strategies for the areas of research and innovation and is also drafting a shared research agenda.