Ursula Far-Hollender was born 1937 in Leipzig and grew up in a family of merchants with international relations. Due to the Second World War she had to leave Leipzig as a child and spent most of her youth in Bad Pyrmont , where she graduated from High School in 1957. After six months' stay in London she started studying law in Freiburg and continued in Neuchâtel, Frankfurt/M, Cape Town and Marburg. After passing the first and second State Exam in Law she joined the staff of the Deutsche Forschundggemeinschaft, DFG (German Research Foundation) in Bonn in 1968. In the beginning she was mainly engaged in organizing meetings of the referees to assess applications for the new funding programme Sonderforschungsbereiche (Collaborative Research Centres).
From the seventies until her retirement in 2000 she was what is now called Programme Director in the section of Humanities and Social Sciences and was responsible for the areas of Law, Ethnology and Geography.
