At the beginning of the year, there were many plans for scientific activities such as conference visits, research stays, conferences to be organised, international guest visits etc. – then, due to the pandemic, many things turned out quite differently, but we still achieved a lot together: Jutta Günther was appointed to the Bremen Enquete Commission “Climate Protection Strategies” at the beginning of the year and in February was appointed as Vice President Research of the University of Bremen – she took office on 1 April. The H2B project on the potential of green hydrogen in Bremen started on 1 January. At the end of January, the Mentoring Program for Female Students of the women's representatives of our faculty was successfully completed for the second time. From our working group Mariia Shkolnykova and Jarina Kühn accompanied the program. In March, Ann Hipp and Tobias Wendler completed their doctorates with top marks and are now devoting themselves to their postdoctoral projects. Shortly before the lockdown in March, Jutta Günther organized the international input-output workshop with the Bochum University of Applied Sciences and the GWS in Osnabrück. Charlotta Cordes, Jarina Kühn and Mareike zum Felde successfully defended their exposé in the BIGSSS online during the summer semester and Patrick Wolf was accepted as a doctoral student. On 1 June we welcomed Ferhad Slivi (trainee) and Julian Thiele (doctoral student) as new members of our team. Our long-time colleague, Andrei Yakovlev, was appointed Research Ambassador at the University of Bremen. In June, Matheus Leusin organized an online workshop on data use of “Orbis” for young researchers. Furthermore, the planning for this year’s summer school of the association “Netzwerk ökonomische Bildung und Beratung e.V. (NÖBB e.V.)” with involvement of Philip Kerner and Jutta Günther was pushed forward. Since January, three new ierp Discussion Papers have been published from within our working group – all with the participation of Mariia Shkolnykova. Katharina Friz and Mariia Shkolnykova have pushed forward or successfully completed two projects – Neo-Indikatorik and B2B – that were initiated by our former colleague, Muhamed Kudic. Since April, Jessica Birkholz and Mariia Shkolnykova have intensively continued their didactic training online with the goal of obtaining a nationally recognized certificate. Together with colleagues from Jena, we submitted a project application to the VW Foundation: “Small firms matter! How the corona crisis challenges German Mittelstand”. In the joint project Mod-Block-DDR we have set up an online colloquium to present research papers of the project team on a regular basis. The ierp-seminar also took place digitally and the PhD students of the working group presented their research papers. Furthermore, Katharina Friz and Tobias Wendler both presented their latest research papers online: Katharina Friz at the ICSID Conference of HSE Moscow and Tobias Wendler at the EAERE Annual Conference. Jessica Birkholz and Jarina Kühn presented their joint poster online at the "Cognitive Economics Conference".
Last but not least: In teaching, with the active participation of Björn Jindra and excellent technical support from Marcel Lange, a comprehensive digital offer for our students was made possible by Jessica Birkholz/Jutta Günther (Accompanying seminar), Philip Kerner (Micro exercise), Toby Law (Bachelor seminar), Matheus Leusin (Master seminar), Mariia Shkolnykova (Micro exercise), Gero Stenke (Master seminar) and Tobias Wendler/Jutta Günther (Micro lecture). We are happy about the positive feedback we have received from students.
We would like to cordially thank all our cooperation partners, supporters and colleagues and wish them all a relaxing semester break and enjoyable summer holidays!
