Private Donations Fund Theory Institute in Germany

In a quest to become internationally competitive in the theoretical sciences, the fledgling Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies in Frankfurt, Germany, is breaking with European traditions in the structural, teaching, and funding schemes it adopts.

“We have a strong group in neuro-science,” says Wolf Singer, a director at the nearby Max Planck Institute for Brain Research and, with nuclear physics theorist Walter Greiner, a founding director of FIAS. Singer ticks off areas of inquiry at the new institute: polymers, the immune system, neural networks, hadron physics, heavy-ion cancer therapy, left-handed chirality of biologically relevant molecules. “These are all multicomponent systems that self-organize to ordered states, generate patterns, and encode information,” he says. “That’s what ties them together. It’s essentially nonlinear dynamics.”

“Our fellows are very strongly urged to collaborate across disciplines,” says Horst Stöcker, an astroparticle physicist at FIAS. So far, he says, “I am really impressed by the chemistry among the people.” Adds Greiner, “One has to be careful that it’s not just interdisciplinary blah blah blah, shallow talking. We are eager to go into depth.”

Structurally, FIAS is patterned after the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. The new institute currently has nine fellows plus a dozen or so adjunct fellows, and the plan is to double in size. When it was founded, the IAS got off to a running start, Greiner says. “First, they had a tremendous donation. Second, many of the great Jewish scientists who emigrated [from Europe because of the Nazis] went to Princeton. This made Princeton big and famous on the spot. We don’t have that. But we have people from Russia who, because of the general decline of support and living standards, want to come to western countries. This gives us the opportunity to hire the best, which we did.”

Unlike at Princeton’s IAS, FIAS fellows must teach. They do that at the Frankfurt International Graduate School for Science, which, like FIAS, is located on the new science campus of the University of Frankfurt. Teaching is in English and, in contrast to most PhD programs in Europe, doctoral students must take classes.

Perhaps most striking is that FIAS’s funding comes mainly from private and corporate donors—no strings attached. In this sense, says Stöcker, “FIAS is an excellent model. The problem in Europe in general is that we have much less sponsoring by private sources. We have sponsoring for sports and for museums, but not in the brains of the next generation.” FIAS has raised about C15 million ($19.3 million) to be spread over five years. More is needed to establish permanent positions—they’re now three-and five-year appointments—and to erect a dedicated facility.