In February, the newly reelected rector Professor Hans-Jochen Schiewer spoke to members of Alumni Freiburg e.V. and the funding organizations about current prospects for development at the University of Freiburg. The main focus will be on strengthening the university’s ties with the research centers and promoting transnational cooperation between the universities on the Upper Rhine.

Rector Schiewer sees the university as having sharpened its profile with a distinctive area of research emphasis through the cooperation between medicine, biology, and engineering at the university’s Clusters of Excellence BIOSS and BrainLinks-BrainTools as well as at the Spemann Graduate School. The university also aims to strengthen its ties with further research centers, such as the Arnold Bergstraesser Institute. Furthermore, the university plans to establish a stronger profile in the area of popular culture and music by giving the “German Folk Music Archive” an interdisciplinary focus. Finally, the university will further strengthen its alliance with the Fraunhofer Society by founding a performance center for sustainability.

Rector Hans-Jochen Schiewer also aims to intensify cooperation between the universities on the Upper Rhine. The Eucor partner universities Basel, Mulhouse-Colmar, Freiburg, Strasbourg, and Karlsruhe provide all the necessary ingredients for extensive cooperation in science and research on a “European campus.” The partners plan to make better use of the region’s great potential by implementing the concept “Trinationale Metropolregion Oberrhein“ (“Upper Rhine Transnational Metropolitan Region”). The confederation’s strategic goals include establishing infrastructure for conducting large-scale, transnational research in bioinnovation, microsystems engineering, and materials sciences.

At the end of his presentation, Rector Schiewer introduced the alumni to the construction projects planned for the campus of the Faculty of Engineering and reported on the scheduled completion of the new University Library at the end of winter semester 2014/15.