Another success for the promotion of young academics at the University of Oldenburg: the state of Lower Saxony is funding three new coordinated doctoral programmes from the autumn. This means that a further 36 three-year scholarships will be available for doctoral candidates at the university. The funding amounts to around 2.4 million euros.
"Providing young researchers with the best possible starting opportunities for their careers - whether they want to stay in research permanently or take a different path - is a central concern for us," says University President Prof Dr Dr Hans Michael Piper. "With the acquisition of the new state doctoral programmes, we see this as confirmation of our intensive efforts to recruit young talent and are pleased to be able to continue to occupy a leading position in Lower Saxony."
The Ministry of Science of Lower Saxony (MWK) received a total of 43 proposals from universities. Twelve of these will be funded by the Volkswagen Foundation's "Niedersächsisches Vorab" programme over the next four years. All of the selected programmes are cooperative concepts in which several universities are involved.
In future, the University of Oldenburg will coordinate new doctoral programmes on the topics of marine analytics and migration society as well as extracurricular science and technology learning.
"EcoMol - The ecology of molecules " is the name of the programme, which the university is running jointly with the Jade University of Applied Sciences. The coordinator is marine researcher Prof Dr Thorsten Dittmar from the University's Institute of Chemistry and Biology of the Marine Environment (ICBM). The interplay of ecological and geochemical processes in seawater and their molecular complexity are at the centre of the project. Chemists, biologists, mathematical modellers and engineers will contribute their expertise to guide the next generation of researchers and accompany them on their way to a doctorate.
The programme "Migratory Border Formations in Society", in which the University of Oldenburg, together with the Universities of Göttingen and Osnabrück, offers the opportunity to do a doctorate, is also interdisciplinary. The coordinator is the head of the Oldenburg "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 border formations - and thus the analysis of migratory social orders of belonging in historical and contemporary contexts.
The acquisition of knowledge in the STEM disciplines (Mathematics, Computing Science, Natural Sciences and Technology) is the focus of the " STEM Learning in Informal Spaces" programme, which the university is launching in co-operation with the universities of Hanover, Vechta, Odense (Denmark) and Rethymno (Greece) as well as around 15 extracurricular educational institutions. The coordinator is the Oldenburg physics didactics expert Prof Dr Michael Komorek. In this programme, young scientists will investigate how learning takes place in national park houses, science centres, school laboratories or environmental centres, to what extent processes of research-based learning can be successfully initiated there and how regional offers can be meaningfully related to each other, and help develop coordinated teaching-learning concepts.
Every two years, universities in Lower Saxony can apply for new doctoral programmes. In the previous round in 2014, the University of Oldenburg was able to apply for four such programmes, which will run until 2018. These programmes focus on research into renewable energies and safety-critical systems, biodiversity research and the humanities and social sciences. A total of 17 coordinated doctoral programmes and research training groups are currently running at the University of Oldenburg, spread across all six Schools.
