Press Relase: Georgia Augusta successful in the Excellence Initiative with its “Institutional Strategy”

Funding also granted for Graduate School for Neurosciences and Molecular Biosciences

In the Excellence Initiative by the German Federal and State Governments, the University of Göttingen has achieved success with its “Institutional Strategy to Promote Top-Level Research”: This decision in the second round of the competition for excellence was announced on Friday, 19 October 2007, at the Wissenschaftszentrum in Bonn. The Göttingen Graduate School for Neurosciences and Molecular Biosciences (GGNB) has also been selected for funding. President of the University, Prof. Dr. Kurt von Figura, said: “We are pleased and proud of this result. In unprecedented manner, we succeeded in joining forces within the University and across the scientific location as a whole to work together on our future strategy. Through our collective endeavours, the University and its local partners will take Göttingen to the top amongst Europe’s leading universities“.

The Institutional Strategy of the Georgia Augusta focuses on the University’s distinctive assets as a research university with a remarkable diversity of subjects, its close networks within an outstanding non-university research environment, and its autonomy as a foundation. In the form of “Brain Gain” and five Courant Research Centres, “Brain Sustain”, the “Lichtenbergkolleg” and “Göttingen International” the successful proposal embraces four projects through which the Georgia Augusta seeks to promote top-level research and, in particular, the fostering and support of young scientists and scholars. The research campus plays an especially important part in the Institutional Strategy “Göttingen. Tradition – Innovation – Autonomy”, with the Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen, five Max Planck Institutes, the German Primate Centre and the German Aerospace Centre particularly closely involved.

Similarly, the Göttingen Graduate School for Neurosciences and Molecular Biosciences, which has also been selected for funding, has its roots in the integration of various scientific disciplines within the University and the extra-university research organisations. On the basis of interdisciplinary, research-based doctoral programmes, the GGNB offers a high-quality education to excellent students from all over the world. Already in the first round of the Excellence Initiative, the Georgia Augusta was successful with the DFG Research Centre Molecular Physiology of the Brain (CMPB). This centre is being expanded through the cluster of excellence “Microscopy at the Nanometer Range”. In the second round of the initiative, the selection committee has evaluated 44 proposals for graduate schools (Funding Line 1), 40 proposals for clusters of excellence (Funding Line 2) and eight institutional strategies (Funding Line 3), coming from a total of 35 universities. The University of Göttingen was not successful in its full-proposal bid for funding of the “Göttingen Graduate School of Terrestrial Ecosystems" (GGTE).