Great success for the promotion of young talent at the University of Oldenburg: the state of Lower Saxony will be funding four new doctoral programmes in future. This is a reward for the intensive efforts to promote young talent, according to Acting President Prof Dr Katharina Al-Shamery.
60 doctoral scholarships are now available for doctoral candidates, with funding totalling four million euros. Prof. Dr Katharina Al-Shamery, Acting President of the University, explained that she was particularly pleased about this funding because it was a reward for the intensive efforts made at the University in recent years to promote young academics.
39 proposals had been submitted by universities in Lower Saxony for the newly advertised doctoral programme of the Ministry of Science and Culture (MWK). Eleven were approved, four of them at the University of Oldenburg alone, making it the most successful university in Lower Saxony. The funding period is three years in each case, and each doctoral programme at the University of Oldenburg receives scholarships for 15 young academics.
The following programmes were approved: "Cultures of Participation" (in co-operation with the TU Braunschweig), "Nano-Energy Research" (in co-operation with the University of Applied Sciences Emden/Leer), "Safe Automated Maritime Systems - SAMS (in co-operation with the Jade University of Applied Sciences Wilhelmshaven/Oldenburg/Elsfleth) and "Interdisciplinary Approach to Functional Biodiversity Research".
"The approved doctoral programmes reflect the great potential of biodiversity research, the humanities and social sciences, renewable energy research and research into safety-critical systems," said Al-Shamery. "And it is the young scientists who are helping to drive this research forward."
The approval is an incentive to continue the course of strong support for young researchers. Back in 2011, under the initiative of Prof. Dr Bernd Siebenhüner (Vice President for Early Career Researchers and Quality Management), the university opened a Graduate Academy to promote young researchers - as an umbrella for the two Graduate Schools in Natural Sciences and Technology (OLTECH) and in the Social Sciences and Humanities.
"Nano-Energy Research" is the name of the doctoral programme that the university is running together with the Emden/Leer University of Applied Sciences. The coordinator is Prof. Dr Christoph Lienau, head of the "Ultrafast Nano-Optics" working group at the Institute of Physics. The doctoral programme combines scientific issues from energy research with basic research in physics and chemistry.
"Safe Automated Maritime Systems (SAMS)" is the name of the doctoral programme that the university is running jointly with the Jade University of Applied Sciences Wilhelmshaven/Oldenburg/Elsfleth, coordinated by Prof. Dr Axel Hahn, Professor of Computing Science at the university. The doctoral programme is intended to help strengthen the research expertise of Computing Science in the maritime sector. It also ideally complements the Oldenburg research networks "Automatic Verification and Analysis of Complex Systems (AVACS)", "System Correctness under Adverse Circumstances (SCARE)" and "Critical Systems Engineering for Socio-Technical Systems (CSE)".
"IBR-Interdisciplinary Approach to Functional Biodiversity Research" is the name of the doctoral programme, which aims to further strengthen biodiversity research in biology; the coordinator is Prof. Dr Gabriele Gerlach from the Institute of Biology and Environmental Sciences. The programme brings together previously separate disciplines: Ecology, evolutionary biology and interdisciplinary approaches to the protection and management of biodiversity. The aim is to be able to provide answers as to how biodiversity will change in the future.
"Cultures of Participation" is the name of the doctoral programme that the university is running in co-operation with the TU Braunschweig and the University of Groningen, headed by Prof. Dr Martin Butler (Institute of English and American Studies at the University of Oldenburg). The title stands for a joint research programme in the humanities and social sciences. The aim is to thematise discourses of cultural participation - in order to shed light on the concept of "participation" and its normative dimension.
The university was already successful in the state of Lower Saxony's doctoral programmes in 2012. At that time, the university received three out of eleven approved programmes, thematically located in teacher training, renewable energies and neurosciences.