Another success for the support of early-career researchers at the University of Oldenburg: from this autumn, the State of Lower Saxony will be funding three new coordinated doctoral programmes. This will make a further 36 three-year scholarships available to doctoral candidates at the university. The total funding amounts to around 2.4 million euros.
“Providing early-career researchers with the best possible start to their careers – whether they intend to remain in research permanently or pursue a different path – is a key priority for us,” said University President Prof. Dr Dr Hans Michael Piper. “Securing funding for the new state doctoral programmes reaffirms our commitment to supporting the next generation of researchers, and we are delighted to be able to maintain our leading position in Lower Saxony.”
A total of 43 proposals from higher education institutions were received by the Lower Saxony Ministry of Science (MWK). Twelve of these will be funded over the next four years through the Volkswagen Foundation’s “Niedersächsisches Vorab” programme. All the selected programmes are collaborative initiatives, meaning that several universities are involved in each one.
The University of Oldenburg will in future coordinate new doctoral programmes in the fields of marine analytics and migration society, as well as extracurricular science and technology education.
‘EcoMol – The ecology of molecules’ is the name of the programme, which the University is running in collaboration with Jade University of Applied Sciences. The coordinator is marine scientist Prof. Dr Thorsten Dittmar from the University’s Institute of Chemistry and Biology (ICBM). The centre focuses on the interplay of ecological and geochemical processes in seawater and their molecular complexity. Chemists, biologists, mathematical modellers and engineers will contribute their expertise to mentor early-career researchers and support them on their path to a PhD.
The programme ‘Migration-Related Social Boundary Formations’ is also interdisciplinary in nature; through this programme, the University of Oldenburg, in collaboration with the Universities of Göttingen and Osnabrück, offers the opportunity to pursue a PhD. The programme is coordinated by the Director of Oldenburg’s ‘Centre for Migration, Education and Cultural Studies’, Prof. Dr Paul Mecheril from the Institute of Educational Sciences. The aim of the doctoral programme is the interdisciplinary investigation of the interactive and organisational production of, for example, political, ethnic, cultural or linguistic boundary formations – and thus the analysis of orders of belonging in migration societies within historical and contemporary contexts.
The acquisition of knowledge in the STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering and Computing Science) is at the heart of the programme ‘STEM Learning in Informal Settings’, which the University is organising in co-operation with the Universities of Hanover, Vechta, Odense (Denmark) and Rethymno (Greece), as well as around 15 out-of-school educational institutions. The programme is coordinated by Prof. Dr Michael Komorek, a physics education specialist from Oldenburg. Young researchers in this programme are tasked with investigating how learning takes place in national park visitor centres, ‘science centres’, school laboratories or environmental centres, the extent to which inquiry-based learning processes are successfully initiated there, and how regional programmes can be meaningfully linked – these are the issues that early-career researchers will investigate in this programme, whilst helping to develop coordinated teaching and learning concepts.
Every two years, higher education institutions in Lower Saxony can apply for new doctoral programmes. In the previous round in 2014, the University of Oldenburg secured funding for four such programmes, which will run until 2018. Thematically, these programmes focus on research into renewable energies and safety-critical systems, biodiversity research, and the humanities and social sciences. In total, the University of Oldenburg currently runs 17 coordinated doctoral programmes and research training groups, spread across all six Schools.
