CEN - Center for Earth System Research and Sustainability
Centerfor Earth System Research and Sustainability (CEN)
Next Round in national Excellence Competition: full application requested from CliCCS
29 September 2017, by CEN Universität Hamburg
Photo: UHH/CEN
Four research clusters at Universität Hamburg will be moving on to the next round in the national funding competition known as the “Exzellenzstrategie des Bundes und der Länder.” Today (29 October 2017) the German Research Foundation (DFG) requested full applications from four research clusters of Universität Hamburg, including ‘Climate, Climatic Change, and Society’, which was initiated from the CEN.
Detlef Stammer, director of CEN and CliCCS-Speaker, says: “We want to to keep expanding the interdisciplinary climate research and therefore strengthen Hamburg’s role as ‘Capital of Climate’. I am very happy that we took this first hurdle together and that DFG requested full applications from CliCCS.”
Besides CliCCS, three other research clusters have made the final round of this important competition. Prof. Dr. Dieter Lenzen, the University’s president, stated: “We closely followed today’s announcement, together and in great anticipation. We are delighted that four of the five research cluster projects that we submitted have reached the final round! This means that we have cleared a major hurdle in the first funding line of the Excellence Strategy. Now a phase of hard work awaits us and particularly our researchers, but it is one we are happy to shoulder. And then we will have to patiently wait for the results.”
The researchers have until February 2018 to complete and submit their applications to the DFG.
Next steps in the Excellence Competition
A committee of experts comprising primarily international researchers with the DFG chose the cluster applications for the next round. The clusters to receive funding as of 1 January 2019 will be announced in September 2018. The number of cluster applications is also important for the next phase of the competition. In the second funding line of the Excellence Strategy, entire universities will be deemed “excellent”. . Universities must have at least two clusters of excellence to apply for recognition as a “University of Excellence.”
In the past Excellence Initiative, the DFG - funded two clusters of excellence at Universität Hamburg: Integrated Climate System Analysis and Prediction (CliSAP) and the Hamburg Center for Ultrafast Imaging (CUI), the latter of which is dedicated to the observation of atoms in real time.
Cluster initiatives in the final round of the Excellence Competition
Climate research: Climate, Climatic Change, and Society (CliCCS)
Research questions such as: How can we limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius or, even better, 1.5 degrees Celsius?
Photon- and Nanosciences: Advanced Imaging of Matter: Structure, Dynamics and Control on the Atomic Scale
Research questions such as: What makes atoms move the way they do, leading them to create new structures with specific functions?
Quantum physics: Quantum Universe
Research questions such as: What are the physics of the Big Bang?