Helmholtz Association (HA, represented by Alfred Wegener Institute) (AFPUM)
The Helmholtz Association with 30,000 employees in 16 research centres is Germany’s largest scientific organisation and has an annual budget of approximately 3 billion Euros. Helmholtz research contributes to solving major challenges facing society, science and industry with top scientific achievements in six research areas: Energy, Earth and Environment, Health, Key Technologies, Structure of Matter, Aeronautics, Space and Transport. Much of the research is multi-disciplinary, conducted in international cooperation. Helmholtz provides access to its infrastructures to researchers from all over the world.
The development, construction and operation of large-scale facilities and complex infrastructures is one of the Helmholtz Association’s central tasks. It cooperates with similar organisations around the world, especially in Europe. It is one of the first hosts of ESFRI infrastructures now under construction, namely FAIR and XFEL and participants in a number of ESFRI preparatory projects, leading one. Consequently, Helmholtz centres operate a number of e-Infrastructures, among them two World Data Centers, a Tier-1 and Tier-2 LHC-Grid site.
Helmholtz as a project partner represents a strong hub of contacts to management and PI level scientists at research programs and research and e-Infrastructures throughout Europe and the world. Through the Helmholtz Open Access project, recently prolonged to 2012, it provides contact to top management of Helmholtz and beyond. Prof Bradshaw, one of the leading scientists behind ITER and Prof. Stöker, director of GSI – home of FAIR – and a vice-president of Helmholtz are members of the Helmholtz Open Access working group.
In particular the Helmholtz Association focus on documenting the current methods and policies for data quality assurance in such fields as global change (as a strong contributor to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), the aging population (e.g., neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinsons’s and dementias) and other challenges addressed by the First Report of the European Research Area Board.
