“We are proud that we were able to submit the full proposals and that we were invited to the review hearing. It is already a great achievement to have made it this far,” said President Jutta Günther. The final funding decision will be announced on May 22, 2025. “Let's all keep our fingers crossed,” Günther urged. She praised the members of the clusters and everyone involved at the university for their excellent work and great commitment.
An Insight into the Proposals: Material Sciences and Marine Research
Professor Marc Avila, the initiative spokesperson, introduced “The Martian Mindset: A Scarcity-Driven Engineering Paradigm” cluster. This cluster has two goals: enabling sustainable exploration of space and contributing to the green transformation on Earth. It aims to create a paradigm in which materials and components with scarce resources are produced in a quality sufficient for use. This is guided by scarcity constraints in four dimensions – natural resources, electric power, human workforce, and information. The research will focus on three areas: First, developing (bio)electrochemical methods for the synthesis of raw materials from low-grade resources. Second, designing and demonstrating low-energy process chains that use these raw materials as input to produce a variety of enough-to-use parts. Third, devising concepts for production facilities operated by small human teams assisted by robots. The fundamental knowledge gained through the Martian Perspective cluster will lay the foundations for a fossil-fuel-free production of materials and parts from scarce resources in a highly automated and resilient way.
MARUM Submits Continuation Proposal Together with the University of Oldenburg
MARUM is already home to one of the 57 Clusters of Excellence currently funded nationally. This time, the researchers at MARUM have submitted the application for continuation of “The Ocean Floor – Earth’s Uncharted Interface” cluster as a joint application together with scientists from the University of Oldenburg. According to spokesperson Professor Heiko Pälike, the cluster wants to investigate how geological, physical, chemical, and biological processes in and on the ocean floor interact with each other, thus influencing the climate system, the global carbon cycle, and the biological productivity in the world’s oceans. The researchers want to better understand the processes in order to include the ocean floor in detailed global mass budgets. This involves deciphering the transport processes of biogenic particles to the ocean floor and their transformation under changing environmental conditions, recording the transfer of carbon and other elements between the ocean floor and seawater, and understanding how ocean floor ecosystems react to environmental changes.
Panel Discussion: Praise and Perspectives
In addition to President Jutta Günther and Professors Avila and Pälike, Irene Strebl, State Councilor for Science, and Julia Sievers, Head of the Administrative Department for Academic Affairs, also took part in a panel discussion. Professor Michal Kucera, Vice President for Research and Transfer, moderated the discussion.
Günther emphasized the enormous importance of the applications for the university: “The Excellence Strategy is evidence of the university's potential and long-term strategies. It radiates into all areas of the university.”
If the University of Bremen and the University of Oldenburg are successful on May 22, 2025 with at least three approved Clusters of Excellence, the two universities could apply jointly for the title “University of Excellence.” The two universities are already considering this possibility and see it as a great opportunity.
The Excellence Strategy at a Glance
The Excellence Strategy is a federal government and state funding program. Its predecessor program was the Excellence Initiative from 2005 to 2018, during which the University of Bremen was awarded the title “University of Excellence.” With the Excellence Strategy, the federal and state governments have set themselves the goal of strengthening the academic competitiveness of German universities. The funding is intended to create forward-looking structures at universities and reinforce networks of academic collaboration.
To become a University of Excellence, a single university needs at least two Clusters of Excellence and a group of universities needs at least three. Clusters of Excellence are large, specialized research networks with several subprojects that are funded over a period of seven years to create scientific breakthroughs in their field with a large number of researchers.
