With around 31,000 students from over 120 nations, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) is one of the largest and most diverse universities in Germany. JGU unites almost all academic disciplines under one roof with its University Medical Center, the Mainz Academy of Fine Arts, the Mainz School of Music, and the Faculty of Translation Studies, Linguistics and Cultural Studies in Germersheim. In over 100 institutes and clinics, 4,400 academics, 560 of whom are professors, teach and carry out research. With 75 fields of study and more than 260 degree courses, JGU offers an extraordinarily broad range of courses.

As the only German university of its size, nearly all of the institutions of JGU are located on one single campus near the city center, which is also home to four partner institutes involved in top-level non-university research: the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry (MPI-C), the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research (MPI-P), the Helmholtz Institute Mainz (HIM) and the Institute of Molecular Biology (IMB). The campus of the University Medical Center is only about a kilometer away and both Mainz Leibniz Association institutions – the Institute of European History (IEG) and the Roman-Germanic Central Museum (RGZM) – are located slightly further away in the inner city. In addition to this, many local businesses also carry out research, making Mainz a uniquely dynamic research hub.