Excellence

Excellence Initiative and Excellence Strategy

With the Cluster of Excellence “The Ocean Floor – Earth’s Uncharted Interface” of MARUM – Center for Marine Environmental Sciences, the University of Bremen is part of the Excellence Strategy of the Federal Government and the Länder and will receive funding from 2019 – 2025. This continues the MARUM success story, which started as a DFG research center and since 2006 has been working with a Cluster of Excellence at the highest international level.

In the first round of the Excellence Initiative, the Bremen International Graduate School for Marine Sciences GLOMAR, which was later permanently integrated into MARUM, had already been funded. The social science graduate school BIGSSS was also funded for two rounds in the Excellence Initiative. Following the end of this funding, BIGSSS has been established as a permanent institution of the University of Bremen and the Jacobs University.

Only forty years after its foundation, the University of Bremen has been awarded the title “University of Excellence” and thus being placed in the top-level German research universities. In 2012, together with ten other German universities, it received this acknowledgment for its institutional strategy concept. What some have called “the Weser miracle” was actually the result of a high level of commitment, close cooperation, and clear profiling over several decades. The university is continuing on its path of excellent research. This is also true after it was unable to secure 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 line “Excellence University” in the period after 2019.

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 nationally 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 master’s degree programs; these are also characteristics of an excellent university. As a European university in the YUFE network, the university is shaping the European higher education of the future.

The whole university was involved in defining its future perspectives for a sustainable development in its Strategy 2018–2028.