The University Medal is the highest honor that the University of Bonn can bestow on its members and its wider community, meaning that it is only ever awarded to people who have rendered truly special service to the University. The medal is presented by the Rectorate and the Senate, which counts representatives of all the University’s status groups among its members. This year, this unique accolade was conferred on to four exceptional individuals during the ceremonial opening of the academic year 2025/26.

Will it be possible to treat severe kidney inflammation with fewer drugs in the future? A new study by the University Hospital Bonn (UKB), the University of Bonn, and the University of Hamburg gives cause for hope. The researchers show that even low, repeated doses of steroids could be enough to stop inflammation in particularly aggressive crescentic glomerulonephritis (cGN). The findings, which have now been published in Science Translational Medicine, could fundamentally change the treatment of many patients – and significantly reduce side effects.

Language models are now also being used in the natural sciences. In chemistry, they are employed, for instance, to predict new biologically active compounds. Chemical language models (CLMs) must be extensively trained. However, they do not necessarily acquire knowledge of biochemical relationships during training. Instead, they draw conclusions based on similarities and statistical correlations, as a recent study by the University of Bonn demonstrates. The results have now been published in the journal Patterns.

An international research project has been launched involving Dr. Eva Marie Lehner and Julia Schmidt of the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies (BCDSS) Cluster of Excellence at the University of Bonn. The project aim is to study how bureaucratic classifications of people influenced social orders in southern Africa during the colonial period. The collaborative project titled “Economies of Trust: Digital Infrastructure on the Urban Poor in the Cape Colony” is receiving €253,000 of funding from the Gerda Henkel Foundation. A further subproject at the BCDSS is devoted to studying the social networks of single women.

Artificial intelligence has become a common presence within the University's central administration. Two years after the launch of an AI initiative for central administration employees, we sit down for an update with Holger Impekoven, who heads the Services field of operation and serves as Vice Provost for the University of Bonn. He is joined by Michael Prill, Digitalization of Administrative Processes Program (PDaP) Lead, and Nicola Thiele, Head of Human Resource Development, Organizational Development and Health Management in the employee podcast “Lass mal hören.” We haven’t quite reached the point where people are talking about “a new colleague named AI.” The trio nevertheless provides plenty of fascinating information about the AI tools they use in their private and professional lives, the work of the Communities of Practice, how the training sessions have been received, why AI is here to stay, and what lies ahead.  

The University of Bonn is to usher in the 2025/26 academic year with an official ceremony in the main auditorium of its Main Building on Monday, October 20, 2025. The event starts at 5 pm, with doors open from 4:30 pm. Representatives of the media are most welcome to attend, although we would be grateful if they could let us know if they are planning to come.

The University of Bonn celebrated its traditional First-Semester Students’ Welcome on October 8, which offered them no end of things to see and do. As well as providing information, the emphasis was mainly on making new contacts so that the new students could get the latest chapter in their lives off to a successful start.  

In climate studies, parallels are frequently drawn between today’s age (the Holocene) and the last interglacial warm period of roughly 130,000 years ago. Now it has been demonstrated in a new international project with significant involvement by the University of Bonn that the Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC) shifted substantially further south during the previous warm period relative to its position in the Holocene. Changes in the Earth’s orbit were a major factor in this, meaning variable amounts of incoming solar radiation. Modeling indicates that natural conditions could push the Antarctic Circumpolar Current northward in the future, counteracting a southward shift caused by climate change. The study has now been published in the journal “Nature Communications”.