Ursula Weyrich studied law in Mainz and Clermont-Ferrand, completing her legal training in 1998 with the bar examination. She initially worked as a lawyer, specializing in labor, corporate, and tax law, before moving to the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF) as policy officer, where she was responsible, among other things, for the merger of the GMD Research Center Information Technology with the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft.
After a period spent working as the personal assistant to the permanent secretary at BMBF, she became head of division at BMBF in 2006. In that capacity, she was responsible for the Helmholtz centers in Jülich and Karlsruhe, the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP), and for setting up the W7-X fusion experiment in Greifswald. Her responsibilities also included assisting with the merger of the University of Karlsruhe and the Research Center Karlsruhe to form the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT).
At the end of 2008, as an administrative founding board member, Ursula Weyrich assumed responsibility for setting up the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases.
She was Administrative Managing Director of the GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research and the Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research in Europe (FAIR) GmbH in Darmstadt since November 2014.
