Excellence delivered by the JMU
JMU has been successful in all funding rounds of the German Excellence Competitions from the beginning in 2006:
Cluster of Excellence ct.qmat
The future of high tech hinges on groundbreaking materials! The Würzburg-Dresden Cluster of Excellence ct.qmat – Complexity and Topology in Quantum Matter – is home to nearly 400 scientists from over 30 countries.
These dedicated researchers discover and develop innovative topological quantum materials and explore their practical applications in everyday settings. At ct.qmat, we foster a global network of scientific talent and champion a comprehensive societal grasp of quantum technology.
Graduate School of Life Sciences (GSLS)
The University of Würzburg Graduate School of Life Sciences (GSLS) is one of the most successful graduate schools in the Excellence Initiative. In the 2006-2019 funding periods, it received around €18 million in funding. Currently, it is being funded by the Free State of Bavaria and the JMU. Currently home to more than 600 doctoral researchers in the natural sciences (more than 40% of whom are from abroad) and around 200 in medicine, the GSLS takes a highly personalised approach to training its doctoral researchers, giving them the opportunity to prepare for their chosen career paths in an autonomous manner and to gain the qualifications required to work in highly skilled leadership roles both in and outside academia. The GSLS provides doctoral training in the natural sciences and in medicine and offers the FOKUS Master Life Sciences Master’s programme as well as a ‘Postdoc Plus’ programme.
Rudolf Virchow Center
As one of only three research centres, the Rudolf Virchow Center (RVZ) was selected in 2001 from among 80 applicants for a total of up to 12 years of funding.
Its excellence in research and its innovative structural approaches, including the interdisciplinary degree programme in Biomedicine and the ‘Virchow Graduate Programme’ for doctoral researchers, have made the Rudolf Virchow Center a model for the Clusters of Excellence in the Excellence Initiative. The maximum funding period for the RVZ ended in 2013. Since then, it has been funded by the Free State of Bavaria as a central research institution of the university.
Round two of the Excellence Strategy of the German federal and state governments started in February 2023. The universities in Germany had been invited to submit new draft proposals for funding under the ‘Clusters of Excellence’ funding line to the German Research Foundation (DFG) by the end of May. The DFG received 143 draft proposals for new Clusters of Excellence, among them five by or with the participation of the JMU.
These draft proposals will be reviewed by international panels of reviewers in autumn of 2023, and in February 2024, it will be announced which of them have been selected to proceed to the full proposal stage.
