We are proud to announce a new user-optimised funding platform, which will launch in early 2025. Important: Our current "Application and report system" will be unavailable from the end of November 2024. You will be able to apply for funding again from mid-January 2025. Find out more about the transition and what applicants and grantees need to know. 

The 'Momentum - funding for recently tenured professors' initiative offers researchers the opportunity to further develop their professorship in terms of content and strategy at an early stage after taking up their first tenured full professorship. In our interview, Selahattin Danisman, program director at the Volkswagen Foundation, explains the key aspects of 'Momentum'. Next deadline: 28 April 2025

The last projects in the Foundation's funding initiative 'Central Asia/Caucasus'  will soon come to an end. Other research funders, including the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, will follow up in the region – and the Foundation will be continuing its international funding activities with new topics. A discussion about the complementarity of private and public funding of projects that take place abroad. 

Lower Saxony's Science Minister Falko Mohrs takes over as Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Volkswagen Foundation, Germany's largest private science funding organisation. The federal cabinet and the state government of Lower Saxony have appointed a total of three new members to the foundation's highest decision-making body.

Together with ‘Falling Walls Female Science Talents’ and other partner organisations, the Volkswagen Foundation supports the Women's Impact Award. The first three shortlisted winners have now been announced - congratulations!

Sociologist Andreas Bischof has summarised his view on the challenges of successful transdisciplinarity for our thematic focus ‘Transdisciplinary research’.