Attractive and Reliable Prospects for Researchers
Freiburg, 15/04/2026
In academia, strong commitment and great responsibility are often associated with temporary employment contracts. The University of Freiburg wants to change that and is working towards establishing fair and reliable career paths.
The situation is familiar to anyone working in academia: strong commitment and great responsibility are often associated with temporary employment contracts. The University of Freiburg wants to change that and is working towards establishing transparent, fair, and reliable career paths beyond the professorship. The aim is to attract and retain talent to provide a solid foundation for good teaching and top-level research.
Excellent research, outstanding teaching, and innovative knowledge transfer need more than a wealth of ideas and academic freedom. They also depend on reliable career prospects for the people who perform these tasks. To attract the best talent for this purpose, the University of Freiburg is creating structural conditions that make academic careers beyond the professorship attractive, sustainable, and amenable to development.
In the future, permanent positions will be strategically embedded and assigned in accordance with understandable rules – with external calls for applications, diverse selection committees, and transparent job profiles that reflect the wide variety of university tasks.
‘The University of Freiburg is pursuing the goal of combining permanent academic tasks with permanent academic employment. We are thus making an active contribution to ensuring quality in research, teaching, and transfer, as well as developing our academic culture further’, explains Prof. Dr. Sylvia Paletschek, Vice Rector for University Culture at the University of Freiburg.
„The University of Freiburg is pursuing the goal of combining permanent academic tasks with permanent academic employment. We are thus making an active contribution to ensuring quality in research, teaching, and transfer, as well as developing our academic culture further.“
Prof. Dr Silvia Paletschek
Vice Rector for University Culture at the University of Freiburg
For permanent career options in the academic system
The University of Freiburg is creating permanent career options with the three job profiles lecturer, researcher, and academic manager. These profiles are equivalent but differ in focus. The University of Freiburg is thus helping to shape a development also demanded by the German Science and Humanities Council in its position paper on personnel structures from July 2025.
Parallel to this, the University of Freiburg is strengthening its support services: career advising, onboarding programmes for new researchers, networking events, and offers for international employees, families, and dual-career situations. Freiburg can draw on experience in this area: In 2009 it became one of the first German universities to introduce tenure track professorships. Now the new permanent job profiles are creating additional prospects beyond the professorship.
‘We’re providing academics attractive career paths at the University of Freiburg with our tenure track professorships and our new permanent job profiles. Making it easier to plan academic careers is also conducive to gender equality: The proportion of women in our tenure track professorships is currently at 55 percent’, says Dr. Ramona Wurst, Head of Academic Personnel Development.
With its efforts to provide more reliable career paths, the University of Freiburg is strategically building on its strengths in top-level research, teaching, and transfer and combining them with responsibility for science, society, and the environment.
Monika Schönauer is tracing memories in the brain
How and where are the things we learn stored in our brains? To answer this question, Jun.-Prof. Dr. Monika Schönauer is tracing memories in the brain and studying the fine patterns of neural activity and brain structure in which experiences are fixed.
The University of Freiburg junior professor for neuropsychology heads an Emmy Noether group receiving more than 1.3 million euros in DFG funding for six years. After completing her doctorate at LMU Munich and postdoctoral research at the University of Tübingen, Schönauer initially accepted a position in the USA as a research fellow at Princeton University. When she was offered a professorship at the University of Freiburg in 2020, shortly before the outbreak of the pandemic, she was forced to postpone her plans to build up a sleeping lab. Instead she equipped test subjects with wearable EEG systems, allowing her team to realize large-scale sleeping studies outside the lab. ‘It was extremely helpful that the junior professorship came with a very good financial package that I could use flexibly. That’s one of the things I particularly value about Freiburg – you feel appreciated and encouraged in your research’, says Schönauer.
„It was extremely helpful that the junior professorship came with a very good financial package that I could use flexibly. That’s one of the things I particularly value about Freiburg – you feel appreciated and encouraged in your researchatte, die ich flexibel einsetzen konnte. Das ist etwas, was ich an Freiburg besonders schätze – man erfährt Wertschätzung und fühlt sich in seiner Forschung bestärkt.”
Jun.-Prof. Dr Monika Schönauer
Junior Professor of Neuropsychology, University of Freiburg
Outstanding infrastructure, a constructive work culture, and transparent communication
She received the Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Prize from the German Research Foundation for her work in 2021. The prize is regarded as the most important accolade for young researchers in Germany. For Monika Schönauer, it is the combination of outstanding infrastructure, a constructive work culture, and transparent communication that makes her work in Freiburg so special. ‘I found it incredibly pleasant how my colleagues welcomed me here. The communication is extremely transparent here: budget, financial package, prospects. That’s an exceptionally good foundation for a junior professorship’, she says.
Accordingly, she did not consider offers from other universities – what mattered most to her were reliability and suitability – the prospect of leading a research group over an extended period and at the same time gradually growing into the role of full professor.
Edoardo Milana is working on a new generation of robots
Is AI capable of developing intelligent robots? Jun.-Prof. Dr. Edoardo Milana aims to extend the application potential of robots with an improved design and novel mechanics.
Milana has served as tenure track professor for soft machines at the University of Freiburg’s Department of Microsystems Engineering since 2023 and conducts research on robots made of soft materials that can also function without electronics. His project ‘Creating Neurofluidics for Intelligent Soft Machines’ is receiving 549,000 euros from the Volkswagen Foundation. Milana and his team aim to find out whether it is possible to create a neuromorphic circuit that uses fluids instead of electrons. His work thus ties in with previous work at IMTEK (Department of Microsystems Engineering) and at the University of Freiburg’s Cluster of Excellence ‘Living, Adaption and Energy-Autonomous Materials Systems’.
From rising star to junior professor
Edoardo Milana took his first steps at the University of Freiburg as a participant in the Rising Stars Academy in 2022. The academy gives researchers the opportunity spend time in Freiburg at an early stage in their career, establish contacts, and collaborate with established researchers in their field. Thanks to funding from the German Research Foundation with the Walter Benjamin Programme, he initially conducted research as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Freiburg and was offered the junior professorship he currently holds three months later. Before that, he earned a doctorate at KU Leuven, was a guest scholar at the University of Milan, and researched at the German Aerospace Center in Bonn.
‘Sometimes a single decision can change your career trajectory, take you to a different city or a different country, and open up countless possibilities. The Freiburg Rising Stars Programme truly influenced my career’, says Milana.
Elisabeth Piller is researching the history of transatlantic relations
Jun.-Prof. Dr. Elisabeth Piller has served since November 2020 as junior professor at the University of Freiburg’s Department of History, where she researches and teaches on the history of the United States and transatlantic relations. Her research focuses on American foreign policy and the relationship between the USA and Europe since the end of the 19th century.
Before being offered a professorship at the University of Freiburg, she earned a doctoral degree at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and conducted research at the University College Dublin and the University of Oslo as a postdoctoral fellow. Piller’s current research project, ‘The Good Samaritan: U.S. Food Aid, Postwar Europe, and the Making of the American Century’, is devoted to American foreign humanitarian aid after the Second World War and traces the rise of the USA as a (humanitarian) superpower. As a member of the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies project group ‘Post-War Periods: Plurality – Temporality – Re/Constructions’, she is investigating ways of conducting interdisciplinary research on post-war periods from a trans-epochal and trans-cultural perspective.
Dream job: researcher
‘Being a researcher is my absolute dream job, especially when the conditions are reliable and the junior professorship can be converted into a permanent professorship – as with my tenure track professorship at the University of Freiburg’, says Piller.
In 2024 Piller received an ERC Synergy Grant for her research project ‘The Hidden Weapon: Blockade in the Era of the World Wars (BLOCKADE)’. With a total funding amount of 9.9 million euros, the project is one of the largest ever in the field of history to be funded by the ERC. The University of Freiburg is receiving 2.3 million euros of this sum. The team of researchers at the University of Freiburg, the University of Hamburg, the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, and the University of Amsterdam are re-examining the era of the world wars through the lens of naval , trade, and communication blockades.