Software Engineering Institute: http://www.sei.cmu.edu/
Max Planck Institute for Software Systems: http://www.mpi-sws.org/
UW CSE Software Engineering Research: http://www.cs.washington.edu/research/software.intro.html
(Science can nibble around the edges of the problem of software engineering, but even what results we have strike me as likely to suffer from the usual problems of taking small isolated samples from an n-dimensional space and then trying to extrapolate. For one thing, almost every study you've ever heard of that establishes some "fact" about software engineering was done on students. Scientifically speaking, there's no particular reason to expect such results to translate to professionals in any particular manner.)