To complement the projects it finances out of its own budget, the Federal Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (Bundesanstalt für Arbeitsschutz und Arbeitsmedizin, BAuA) competes nationally and internationally for third-party funding as a means of strengthening the research being done into safety and health in the world of work across academia and encouraging early-career scientists. Its commitment to third-party-funded research also helps BAuA to network more intensively with research partners at universities and other institutions. Of the fifteen BAuA projects overwhelmingly or exclusively financed with third-party funds in 2025, thirteen were being conducted under the auspices of national or international consortiums.
All third-party-funded activities support the objectives and tasks defined in the BAuA Work and Research Programme. An internal third-party-funding strategy sets the framework for targeted, quality-assured, process-driven approaches.
BAuA is especially active under the EU’s key research funding programmes, in particular Horizon Europe, as well as the funding programmes run by the German Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space (Bundesministerium für Forschung, Technologie und Raumfahrt, BMFTR).
BAuA’s current third-party-funded projects include:
German Centre for Mental Health
The German Centres for Health Research are large research alliances funded by the BMFTR with the aim of improving the treatment and prevention of common conditions like cancer and cardiovascular, metabolic, infectious, lung, and neurodegenerative diseases. The new German Centre for Mental Health (Deutsches Zentrum für psychische Gesundheit, DZPG) was established in 2022 following a two-stage competitive process. The DZPG brings together various scientific disciplines (above all psychiatry, neuroscience, social medicine, public health, and psychology) at six sites across Germany to do research into mental diseases and further develop therapeutic and preventive approaches.
BAuA is one of the partners working at the Bochum site, which is led by the Ruhr University Bochum’s Mental Health Research and Treatment Center. The Bochum team is distinguished by its orientation towards clinical psychology and its focus on different life worlds, such as the family, school, and work. The expertise BAuA has built up over many years on the correlations between work and mental health will be brought to bear on these concerns.
F 2577, Initiation phase of the German Center for Mental Health (DZPG): Analysis of working conditions and their effects on mental health
Beautiful
Apart from reliable technologies, it is control centre personnel in particular who, with their extensive experiential knowledge, guarantee the safe operation of gas and power grids. The BMFTR is funding the Stress-optimized Work Design for Critical Infrastructure Network Control Centres (Beautiful) project, the purpose of which is to improve working conditions for personnel at the control centres that manage our critical infrastructure. BAuA is contributing by conducting a specialised sub-project.
Under Beautiful, an interdisciplinary consortium is addressing the challenge of developing high-performance assistance systems for ever more demanding monitoring and management tasks. Such assistance systems are intended to support safe decision-making in complex situations under extreme time pressure. The hope is that transparency and trust in these systems will be boosted by carrying out standardised assessments of the added value they deliver for control centre personnel.
F 2569, Stress-optimized work design for grid control centers of critical infrastructures (Beautiful)
MACRAMÉ
The Horizon Europe-funded project Advanced Characterisation Methodologies to assess and predict the Health and Environmental Risk of Advanced Materials (MACRAMÉ) is seeking to develop harmonised, standardised characterisation and testing methodologies. BAuA is a member of this consortium.
The methodologies to be developed will be important both for occupational safety and health and for the coherent system of regulation aspired to under EU chemicals safety legislation. At the same time MACRAMÉ is expanding the previous focus of the Malta Initiative and the NanoHarmony and Gov4Nano projects, which have primarily concentrated on simple (metal oxide) nanoparticles. With its studies of fibrous and 2D materials, MACRAMÉ will therefore provide important inputs to the regulatory regime that is envisaged, which will give adequate and comprehensive consideration to morphologically determined health risks.
F 2512, NanoHarmony - Towards harmonised test methods for nanomaterials - BAuA contribution
F 2477, Implementation of risk governance: meeting the needs of nanotechnology
