Emergency Support

GAUSS is offering financial support to doctoral candidates for finalizing their PhD in critical situations.
The fund is intended to support every student who has got into a difficult situation without any fault of his/her own. Therefore, GAUSS provides emergency scholarships to enable doctoral students to focus on completing their PhD and not have to worry about making a living. First contact for clarifying financial support in difficult situations is still your supervisor and your thesis advisory committee.

The scholarship is awarded primarily for up to three months in total with 1,200 € per month and will be granted according to the Guidelines for Granting Stipends of the Georg-August-University (German ). Longer support can be granted based on the severity of the emergency.

The prerequisites for receiving the scholarship is (1) in any case the completion and submission of the dissertation within the funding period, (2) the severity of the need, and (3) a well-documented and justified emergency situation. Please note that our financial resources are limited and thus we cannot fund all cases.

Emergencies can be manifold. As a few examples we mention here: contract-/scholarship-/SARS-CoV-2 pandemic issues (e.g. scholarship cancellation or no SARS-CoV-2-related scholarship prolongation), health issues, family situation (please see also the GAUSS Family Fund), travel support (as an emergency case, due to unforeseen but urgently needed scientific trips (not available for conference visits)).
Applications are considered all year round with no specific deadlines. The scholarship cannot start earlier than one month after the respective application due to the decision process.

In case of emergency travel support for scientific trips, those are only available if our finances permit financing - all other emergency funding requests will be given priority over travel grants. Support for business trips in exceptional cases might be granted for field trips (e.g. data collections, excavations) or training in specific methods at collaborator’s laboratories. The graduate school is covering up to 75% of the travel costs, when the host institution of the doctoral candidate is contributing the remaining part (maximum sum 2,000 €).


Please submit your application to office@gauss.uni-goettingen.de including the following documents. Further information and documents are requested when applying for travel support.

Prerequisites for emergency support include:

  • Doctoral candidate enrolled in GAUSS
  • Doctoral thesis shall be submitted within the funding period
  • Funding ends at the latest after the oral examination
  • The experimental work for the thesis should be completed so that the doctoral studies can be realistically finished within the time frame of the stipend

Required documents to be submitted:

  • Title page
  • Description of need (maximum five pages) including the well-documented emergency for required financial support
  • Statement about your financial situation: who else is financing you/your family?
  • Information on the current and previous financing of your PhD project
  • Work schedule for the period of funding and the finalization of the thesis
  • A statement of all thesis advisory committee members outlining why and for which period a scholarship is necessary and when the finalization of the PhD thesis can be realistically expected. The statement has to include a written confirmation that there is no other funding possibility, outlining the efforts to find other sources of funding and plans for alternative funding in case the emergency scholarship is not granted.
  • Proof of annual progress reports and TAC meetings
  • Confirmation of matriculation
  • CV


If you have any questions or problems that you would prefer to discuss with us in person, please do not hesitate to contact us (everything will be treated strictly confidential). You can find our contact details under Contact or via our Advice and Counseling page.