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 German Excellence Strategy 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.
Already in the first round of the DFG Excellence Initiative, the Bremen International Graduate School for Marine Sciences GLOMAR was funded and then integrated into the Cluster of Excellence "The Ocean in the Earth System" of MARUM and thus made permanent. The Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences (BIGSSS) was also funded for the maximum period of rounds. Afterwards, BIGSSS has been continued as a permanent institution of the University of Bremen and Constructor University (formerly Jacobs University).

In 2012, only forty years after its foundation and together with only ten other German universities, the University of Bremen was awarded the title “University of Excellence”, an acknowledgment for its institutional strategy concept that placed the University of Bremen among the top-level German research universities. What some have called “the Bremen miracle” was actually the result of a high level of commitment, close cooperation, and clear profiling over several decades. The University of Bremen is continuing on this path of excellent research. This also applies after it was only able to acquire one of the required two Clusters of Excellence in 2017 and was therefore no longer eligible to apply for the "University of Excellence" funding line for the period after 2019.

The high number of DFG Collaborative Research Centers and other large collaborative projects bear witness to the success of the university’s research priorities and the corresponding profiling strategy, which was started more than two decades ago and continues.

In teaching, the University of Bremen is nationally accredited, and thus able to conduct its own independent quality management of its study programs. The current focus is on research-based learning and setting up innovative new master’s degree programs – to meet the 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.

In the current call for proposals, the University of Bremen is once again participating in the Excellence Strategy competition. In three new initiatives and one renewal proposal, scientists from our high-profile areas are addressing four research topics of great societal importance: conditions of global solidarity, resource- and energy-efficient material production under the extreme conditions on Mars, the joint action and learning of humans and robots, and the role of the ocean floor in the Earth and climate system.