Current News

Mirjam Müller from the Academic Staff Development of the University of Konstanz has written a book on „Promotion - Postdoc - Professur. Karriereplanung in der Wissenschaft“ („Doctoral Studies – Postdoc – Professorship. Career Planning in Academia“) that was recently published:

http://www.campus.de/promotion_postdoc_professur-8559.html

It serves as reference book for Postdocs in the German-speaking region und describes backgrounds and factors of success for a scientific career between doctoral…

Next time when you enter the Zukunftskolleg common room (Y 329) and you are surprised by the masks in the glass cabinet: They result from this year´s University Day in the Humanities focused on Fine Arts and the theatre of Early Modern Italy. Julia Boll, who offered a workshop, and her students prepared a short play in line with the principles of the “Commedia dell’arte,” using the roles and characters this form of Italian theatre provides. In the cabinet you can see the Venetian masks called…

In its current call for 2- and 5-year Fellowships (the closing date for applications was August 31, 2014), the Zukunftskolleg received 172 applications. In its first meeting on October 1-2, the Recruitment Committee will choose the finalists for the ZIF-funded 2-year Postdoctoral Fellowships and the 5-year Research Fellowships, funded by both the ZIF-programme and the German Excellence Initiative. The Recruitment Committee will hold its second selection meeting for six 2-year Postdoctoral…

Senior Fellow Klaus von Heusinger was appointed as member in the section Linguistic Studies at the Academia Europaea. The institution that was founded in Cambridge in 1988 aims at promoting education and research in Europe as well as strengthening interdisciplinary and international scientific exchange. It consists of about 3.000 members coming from 35 European and eight non-European countries which includes leading experts from the physical sciences and technology, biological sciences and…

Daniel Summerer has accepted a Temporary Professorship in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Konstanz. From October 1, 2014 until March 31, 2015 he will be standing in for Prof. Dr. Ulrich Groth in Organic Chemistry with Focus on Chemistry of Natural Materials, Aromatic and Heterocyclic Compounds. It is already the second time that he has been offered this position, last time in winter term 2013/14.

In its latest report “Empfehlungen zu Karrierezielen und -wegen an Universitäten” (“Recommendations for Career Objectives and Paths at Universities”) the German Council of Science and Humanities (Wissenschaftsrat) names the Zukunftskolleg as successful example for promoting young researchers. The report states (on page 119) that an important element of the Zukunftskolleg is the selection of Fellows by a central recruitment committee consisting of internal and external scientists representing all…

We congratulate Marie Revellio (Literature), winner of this year´s Manfred Ulmer Scholarship, and welcome her as Associated Fellow at the Zukunftskolleg. The Manfred Ulmer programme is open to doctoral students of all disciplines at the University of Konstanz and pays 1,000 euros per month over six months. It enables the scholars to bridge a financial gap between their studies and their doctoral phase. Marie Revellio´s PhD project is entitled “Quid facit cum psalterio Horatius? (Hier. epist.…

On August 5, a Munich court and prosecutors agreed to drop the charges against Formula 1 chief Bernie Ecclestone. To put an end to his bribery trial he has to pay a 100 million Dollar fine and thus will not have to go to jail. Ecclestone's lawyer denied that the payment was a circumvention of justice and assured that it is common for settlements to be made in cases such as these. “It is not a deal. It has nothing to do with purchasing freedom”, he insisted. Zukunftskolleg Alumnus Georg Jochum…

Game inventor and Zukunftskolleg Alumnus Steffen Bogen was awarded the “Spiel des Jahres 2014” for “Camel Up” – a game for the whole family that is easy to learn and in which the players have to bet who wins. It is already the second time that Steffen Bogen wins the award: in 2012 for his game “Schnappt Hubi!”.
Read more at: http://www.faz.net/aktuell/gesellschaft/spiel-des-jahres-kamele-machen-das-rennen-13045456.html

We congratulate Philip Leifeld who won the Award for the Best Paper of an Early Career Scholar for the paper “National Parliamentary Coordination after Lisbon: A Network Approach” (authors: Philip Leifeld and Thomas Malang). The prize was awarded at the 1st European Conference on Social Networks (EUSN) in Barcelona, Spain, on July 3rd, 2014; prize money were 500 Euros: http://jornades.uab.cat/eusn/content/winners-eusn-2014-conference-awards-p-leifeld-r-vacca

Albert Kümmel-Schnur´s current installation “Signal-to-Noise-Ratio. Ein Hörsturz“ is shown in the framework of the exhibition „Sounds - Bilder hören, Geräusche sehen“ in the Antonierhaus in Memmingen (http://mewo-kunsthalle.de/ausstellungen/sounds.html). It can be visited until September 7, 2014. More information about Albert Kümmel-Schnur can be found at www.stoertebeker-noise.de, a cooperation between Albert Kümmel-Schnur and Manuel Stettner.

Two Fellows from philosophy, Magdalena Balcerak Jackson and Julia Langkau, were successful at applying for funding of a Colloquium on “Imagination and Fiction”. The German Association of Analytic Philosophy (GAP) has selected the event which will bring together philosophers working on the imagination and our understanding of fiction, as one of the few official colloquia of the next international meeting of the association in Osnabrück in 2015.

Zhongbao Jian met German´s Federal President Joachim Gauck and the president of the Alexander von Humboldt-Foundation Helmut Schwarz during a meeting of Humboldt scholars in Berlin. Zhongbao Jian holds a Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship since July 2013. A picture can be downloaded here.

In its last meeting on June 5, the Executive Committee decided about the winners of the Mentorship programme (application deadline was on May 15). We congratulate Federica Basaglia (Philosophy) who will be mentored by Piero Giordanetti from the University of Milan; Tobias Henschen (Philosophy) who will be mentored by Julian Reiss from Durham University; Philip Leifeld (Politics and Public Administration) who will be mentored by Skyler J. Cranmer from the University of North Carolina, Chapel…

Acting on behalf of the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft the Zukunftskolleg awards the Manfred Ulmer Scholarship to a doctoral student every year. The programme is open to doctoral students of all disciplines and pays 1,000 euros per month over six months. It enables the scholars to bridge a financial gap between their studies and their doctoral phase. Deadline for the current call for applications is July 15, 2014.
More information:

http://www.profil.uni-konstanz.de/stiften-und-foerdern/s…

In an interdisciplinary project funded by the Zukunftskolleg Margarita Stolarova and Tanja Rinker together with their students Corinna Wolf and Aenne Brielmann could demonstrate, how reliability and agreement of ratings need to be analyzed and reported, in order to prevent misinterpretation of results in clinical and educational research. They published a methodological paper that deals with widespread shortcomings in assessing inter-rater agreement and reliability, common in many disciplines,…

In collaboration with German, Italian and Spanish researchers Daniele Brida worked on the fundamental physical mechanisms that lead to charge generation in organic photovoltaic solar cells (trivially they can also be called “plastic solar cells”). Read more in the following paper:

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/344/6187/1001.full

The Zukunftskolleg is warmly welcoming Senior Fellow Irene Heim from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, USA. She has been nominated by Doris Penka and will be our guest until June 6, 2014. Irene Heim is Professor of Linguistics and Head of the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is one of the most renowned scholars working on the semantics of natural languages.

We congratulate Roxana Halbleib whose application at the WIN-Kolleg of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities was granted. Her project „Analyzing, Measuring and Forecasting Financial Risks by means of High-Frequency Data" will be funded for 3 years, starting in June 2014.

The Zukunftskolleg happily welcomes two new colleagues in the Central Office since Monday, May 5.
Magdalena Delucis is our new Program Manager for Internationalization. In succession to Nani Clow, Magdalena coordinates the Marie Curie 'Zukunftskolleg Incoming Fellowships' program, is responsible for the ZIF Research Fellows and covers strategic issues related to EU-funding and internationalization. She can be reached under phone 5686, via email under magdalena.delucis@uni-konstanz.de or in her…

Emmy Noether Group Leader and Zukunftskolleg Research Fellow Andreas Thum was accepted in the international guest researchers programme of the Janielia Farm Research Campus, which is part of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) in Washingten, D.C., USA. Andreas Thum's project about the perception and processing of sensory information and its influence on behaviour in Drosophila larvae will be supported with a grant of 100.000 US Dollar. We congratulate Andreas Thum and wish him all the…

During the first Jour Fixe in summer term 2014 on April 24, the assembly of members elected Monika Class as new member for the Executive Committee. She replaces Doris Penka whose term of office ended after 2.5 years. We congratulate Monika Class and thank Doris Penka very much for her work in the Executive Committee.

We congratulate Barbara Hausmair who will receive this year's Grete-Mostry-Dissertationspreis for her disseration at the University of Vienna. The price is awarded by the university's Department of History and Cultural Science, marking outstanding doctor's theses that expand the current state of research with both profoundness and innvovative strenght. Barbara Hausmair started her Fellowship at the Zukunftskolleg in April.

We congratulate Dominik Wöll who accepted a W1-Junior Professorship with tenure track at the Institute for Physical Chemistry at the RWTH Aachen University. He will start working there in June this year. He thanks the Zukunftskolleg and the people standing behind it for supporting his career and for all the benefits he received during his Fellowship. “In particular I liked the familiar atmosphere; further the interdisciplinary environment provided a lot of interesting insights into the…

We welcome Brendan Balcerak Jackson (Philosophy), Thomas Böttcher (Chemistry), Denis Gebauer (Chemistry) and Michael Pester (Biology) as new Research Fellows at the Zukunftskolleg. Further we welcome Unai Atxitia (Physics), Monika Class (Literature) and Maite Crespo Garcia (Psychology) as new Postdoctoral Fellows.  As the first of a total of eight Postdoctoral and six Research Fellows that were selected in the last call for applications, they started their Fellowship in March.

In the final Workshop on Future Research Directions, held on 23-24 January 2014, the Recruitment Committee decided to offer six out of 14 final candidates applying for a 5-year Research Fellowship a position at the Zukunftskolleg. We welcome our new members.

We congratulate Andreas Thum and Daniele Brida who are funded by the Elite-Programme of the Baden-Württemberg Foundation.
Read more in the following press release: http://www.aktuelles.uni-konstanz.de/presseinformationen/2014/9/

We congratulate Thomas Voigtmann who has been offered a W2-Professorship in “Theory of Soft Matter” in the Department of Physics at the University of Düsseldorf. Thomas Voigtmann is a Research Fellow since April 2009. We wish him all the best!