Bonn’s Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelm-Universität has developed a distinctive international profile for many years. It offers numerous international courses of study and programmes at its various faculties and maintains university and research partnerships worldwide.
Its excellent reputation can also be seen in the funding provided to date by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the German Science Council in the Excellence Initiative of the Federal Government and the Federal States. Since 2006, the University of Bonn has recruited a total of two Clusters of Excellence and two graduate schools. As of January 2019, this number has grown to a total of six Clusters of Excellence.
The Clusters of Excellence are located in the fields of mathematics, immunology, dependency research, robotics, economics and quantum physics and thus cover the entire spectrum of Bonn's study subjects.
The University of Bonn received the announcement from the Excellence Commission during its 200th anniversary year in 2018. It will help fund hundreds of new positions and strengthen science and research in Bonn.
The Clusters of Excellence include:
The Hausdorff Center for Mathematics: Cutting-edge mathematical research
The cluster initiative is led by a team of internationally acclaimed scientists, who have received numerous awards and honors, with Prof. Dr. Peter Scholze, who was recently awarded the Fields Medal - the Noble Prize for Mathematics - as the most prominent example.
ImmunoSensation2: Learning about the intelligence of our immune system
How does the body succeed in adapting the immune response to specific situations? The identification of important players and functionalities of the immune system and two extremely successful biotech spin-offs are among the outstanding successes of the current funding phase of the Cluster of Excellence.
During the funding period, the Cluster "Beyond Slavery and Freedom. Agency in asymmetrical structures of individual or group-related dependency in pre-modern societies" will try to expand this perspective in terms of content, space and time.
PhenoRob
Pheno Rob deals with Robotics and Phenotyping for Sustainable Crop Production to develop methods and new technologies that observe, analyze, better understand and specifically treat plants.
ECONtribute
This cluster, together with the University of Cologne, is the only predominantly economics-focused application that made it into the second round of the Excellence Strategy. Researchers want to analyze the causes of market failure and resulting policy measures in interdisciplinary working groups and with a new set of instruments.
ML4Q – Matter and Light for Quantum Computing
Jointly with the University of Cologne and the RWTH Aachen, Bonn researchers want to work on making this new technology usable. To achieve this, quantum bits or even qubits - the quantum counterpart to our previous bits - quantum communication channels that build networks and error correction methods - have to be explored from the ground up.
Since 1 January 2019, the clusters of excellence receive funding of up to ten million euros per year for an initial period of seven years.
