Excellent Graduate School funded

The comission for the so called excellence initiative in Germany decided on Friday, 13th that the graduate school: “Global Change in the Marine Realm” of the University of Bremen will be funded with five million Euros over the next five years. The Research Center Ocean Margins is heavily involved. The graduate school is a cooperation of all the regional institutes active in the marine sciences as well as the departments of social sciences and law at the University Bremen.

The challenges to society posed by global change– as already visible today and probably amplified in the future – require the interdisciplinary and international cooperation of the leading scientists in the relevant scientific fields to analyze, understand, predict, and – where necessary – to mitigate the changes to the natural environment and society. The Graduate School on “Global Change in the Marine Realm” will contribute to this task by educating young researchers in a stimulating research and training environment, to enable them early in their doctoral training, and especially in their subsequent career, to be part of this worldwide research effort.

The Graduate School will build on the particularly strong expertise in marine sciences in Bremen and Bremerhaven that are concentrated in several faculties and research institutions of the University of Bremen, in the Bremen-based Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology and Center for Marine Tropical Ecology, as well as in the Bremerhaven-based Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research and the German Maritime Museum. Through the Graduate School the combined competence of these university and non-university institutions will be utilized to educate doctoral students towards conducting independent research in all aspects of marine sciences comprising here the natural sciences as well as the humanities.
Building on a clearly structured curriculum aligned with active participation in competitive research projects, the Graduate School will guide its doctoral students to become disciplinary highly qualified, interdisciplinary thinking and internationally networking scientists within 3 years. In preparing its ~60 doctoral students for a successful career in academia, industry and administration the research training program will not only include the newest techniques and methods, but will also provide students with soft skills and with experience in project management all along the line from project development via proposal writing to reporting.

In addition, the Graduate School will offer an individually tailored family-support program to improve the compatibility of family and career. Based on all these components, the Graduate School finally aims at educating a new generation of expertly trained and cosmopolitan young researchers well-versed in other disciplines that will contribute to the exciting and challenging research and discoveries in the field of marine global change research that lie ahead.

For further information please contact the speaker of the graduate school: