Barbara Heller-Schuh joined AIT in the year 2002 and works as a scientist at the Center for Innovation Systems & Policy. She graduated in History, German Language and Literature studies at the Karl Franzens University in Graz, Austria and in Knowledge Management at the Danube University in Krems, Austria. Her main research interests cover research and innovation policy, innovation networks and higher education research. She has been involved in several research and consulting projects dealing with the exploration of collaborative R&D projects to analyse network structure and dynamics at different policy levels. More recently, she carried out a number of studies analyzing the governance and funding systems of universities and their research performance. Main research topics in this area are participation patterns of universities in the European Framework Programmes, national funding systems of universities and their research infrastructures, quality in higher education, and organisational demography of public sector research organisations. Furthermore, she is responsible for the maintenance of the EUPRO database, a comprehensive database containing cleaned and standardized information about all accessible projects and their participants of the EU-Framework Programmes.