As a place of research and teaching, a dynamic workplace, innovation and transformation engine, an open institution of higher education and academic meeting place, the university is a focal point for the diverse developments of digital transformation. This holds enormous opportunities, but also entails challenges.

By creating the Presidential Department for Digitalisation in 2020, the university elevated its engagement with the opportunities and challenges of digital transformation to an overarching level. The university's first interdepartmental digitalisation strategy reflects this position. The university has thus laid the foundation for building a systematic and structurally anchored strategy for developments and measures in the area of digitalisation.

Scientific inquiry into topics related to digitalisation and digital transformation will be promoted at the university, among other things, through six additional digitalisation professorships that were successfully acquired in 2019 as part of the state call for applications providing "Digitalisation Professorships for Lower Saxony". Complementing the expertise from computer science and IT-related fields, the work of the new professors, who are currently being appointed, is to be dedicated to securely designing digitalisation from an interdisciplinary perspective through research, teaching and transfer, as laid out in the application concept.

Numerous research activities are bundled in the research centre "Human-Cyber-Physical Systems" (HCPS), which offers a cross-disciplinary and cross-institutional platform for creating, coordinating and implementing a joint research strategy in the area of human-cyber-physical systems.

Current strategic measures of the Presidential Board include:

• Advancing academic instruction: For years, the university has vigorously devoted itself to designing contemporary and sustainable research-based teaching as part of the two-phase, federally funded project "Research-based Learning in Focus". In 2021, it successfully applied for federal funding again to incorporate key insights gained by institutions of higher education from the pandemic into the development of digitally enriched teaching over the next few years.

• Creating information infrastructure for research: University standards for needs-based research data management and a central research information system will be among the indispensable prerequisites for successfully conducting research and acquiring research funding in the coming years. In addition, the use of digital research infrastructure is expected to influence the way researchers of all disciplines pursue science. The university is strategically positioning itself in this area, pushing ahead with the introduction of future-oriented solutions.

• Expanding a systematised project and portfolio management: By now, digitalisation has permeated all areas of work. Through the uniform and standards-based development of change processes in administration, the university has created the prerequisite, in the form of a project and portfolio board, to strategically manage the use of digitalisation and to implement it in a quality-assured manner.