TU9 German Universities of Technology e. V. is the alliance of nine leadinguniversities of technology inGermany. The current joint-leadership of the TU9 consists of the two co-presidents Prof. Dr.-Ing. Peter Middendorf, rector of the University of Stuttgart, and Prof. Dr. Angela Ittel, president of the Technical University of Braunschweig.[1]
TU9 was established in 2003 as an informal consortium of those Institutes of Technology inGermany which were established before 1900. The founding president of TU9 is Horst Hippler, also president of theUniversity of Karlsruhe. Theregistered association ("e. V.")TU9 German Institutes of Technology e. V. was solemnly founded on January 26, 2006, atTU Braunschweig. Its head office is in Berlin. The following presidents (or their representatives) attended foundation and signed the certificate of incorporation:
The mission of this organization is to act as contact for society, economy and politics, particularly for the university education of engineers. The members of TU9 mutually accredit their bachelor's and master's degrees and, therefore, support the progression of theBologna process and quality assurance concerning university education of engineers.
Associated especially through their core subjects, the engineering sciences, the members of TU9 pay attention particularly to the public perception of topics with high relevance to these sciences. This includes analysis of statistics about third-party funds[2] and the description of the importance of the TU9 universities concerning graduates.[3]
According to the research report 2018 of theGerman Research Foundation (DFG), TU9 universities are among the universities with the highest third-party funding in Germany. They received more than one-fifth (21%) of all DFG grants across all scientific disciplines.[4] TheTU Dresden received the highest number of DFG grants inelectrical engineering, theTU Darmstadt incomputer science and theRWTH Aachen inmechanical engineering.[4] In a competitive selection process, the DFG selects the best research projects from researchers at universities and research institutes and finances them. The ranking is thus regarded as an indicator of the quality of research.[5] In the profile area ofengineering, almost 50% of the DFG funding volume goes to TU9 universities.[4] Almost a quarter of all recipients of aEuropean Research Council grant, the highest endowed science prize of theEuropean Union, preferred one of the TU9 universities.[4]RWTH Aachen andTU Darmstadt are among the universities with the highest number of top managers in the German economy. They belong to the top 3 universities.[6] Five of the elevenGerman Universities of Excellence are TU9 universities (RWTH Aachen, TU Berlin, TU Dresden, KIT, and TU Munich).[7] Three of the five German National Competence Centers forArtificial Intelligence at universities are based at TU9 universities (TU Berlin,[8] TU Dresden,[9] and TU Munich[10]).
