Excellence
Excellence Initiative and Excellence Strategy
In only forty years, the University of Bremen – founded in 1971 – has achieved the status of being named a “University of Excellence”. In 2012, together with ten other German universities, it received this acknowledgement of merit for its institutional strategy concept for cutting-edge research. What some have called “the Weser miracle” was the result of high motivation, close cooperation, and clear profiling over several decades. The University continues to pursue its path of excellent research. This remains the case, even though it was unable to gain the required two clusters of excellence in the current round of the Excellence Initiative and is therefore no longer eligible to apply to the funding program “Excellence University” in the period after 2019.
With the Cluster of Excellence „The Ocean Floor – Earth’s Uncharted Interface“ of MARUM – Center for Marine Environmental Sciences, the University of Bremen will be part of the Excellence Strategy. Following up on the current Cluster of Excellence at MARUM, the new Cluster of Excellence that will be funded for seven years (2019-2026), will again be located in the marine sciences. In the first phase of the Excellence Initiative, the Bremen International Graduate School for Marine Sciences GLOMAR had already been funded and was later integrated into MARUM as a permanent structure. The socio-scientific graduate school BIGSSS was also funded for two phases in the Excellence Initiative. Following the end of this funding line, BIGSSS has been established as a permanent structure of the University of Bremen and the Jacobs University.
Nevertheless, the University currently has more DFG Collaborative Research Centers than ever before: This is mainly owing to its high profile research areas and profiling strategy that began over twenty years ago. The University of Bremen is now system accredited, and thus able to conduct its own independent quality management in the area of teaching. The current focus is on research-based learning and setting up innovative new masters programs, these are also characteristics of an Excellent University. At the same time, it is establishing new, dependable career paths with a tenure perspective in addition to the professorship career path. The whole University was involved in developing the future perspectives formulated in Strategy 2018–2028.
