Three members of the BMBF's research consortium will work on their doctorates in close connection with the Bremen International Graduate School for Social Sciences (BIGSSS). Jarina Kühn, Mareike zum Felde and Charlotta Cordes started the program this week together with the other newly affiliated Fellows.

Behind the PhD-Students lies an informative orientation week in which they dealt, for exampel, with questions of academic integrity. The Prep Forum also began this week with a kick-off event on fundamental questions of methodology. As part of this offer, the new Fellows will attend further introducing seminars on various methods, from case studies to mixed-methods approaches, in the coming weeks.

The BIGSSS is an international graduate school run jointly by the University of Bremen and Jacobs University in Bremen. It is one of the leading international graduate schools in the field of empirical social science research in Germany. The head of the research consortium Prof. Dr. Jutta Günther and the co-director of the Research Centre for East European Studies Prof. Dr. Heiko Pleines are members of the faculty. They contribute to the work of the BIGSSS together with members of their team within the framework of the Mod Block project. The recent admission of the project team members, whose research projects will benefit in many ways from the support of the BIGSSS, stands in this context.