This entitles them to contact international postdocs themselves and put them forward for a Humboldt Research Fellowship at the University of Bonn. Each is allowed to nominate up to three people who, provided they meet the formal criteria, will be awarded a fellowship there and then without the need for a separate academic selection process. In other words, the foundation relies solely on the academic judgment of its scouts and gives them significant freedom to choose suitable researchers.
Not just about the list of publications
When on the hunt, Mass and Tchumatchenko look for academic independence, curiosity and profiles that would add new angles to their existing working groups.
“I make a point of looking for people who are working on a completely different topic to us,” says Mass, an immunologist based at the Life & Medical Sciences Institute (LIMES). Her research interests include macrophages and their role in organ development as well as how pollutants such as microplastics impact the metabolism. “Combining our expertise with new methods and questions often throws up ideas that none of us would have thought of on our own,” she says. “I’m less bothered by the length of someone’s list of publications and more by the potential they offer to create something genuinely new together with us.”
Tchumatchenko, a professor in the Faculty of Medicine, seeks out individuals who come up with research questions on their own initiative and are able to work across subject boundaries. As she explains: “Computer-aided systemic neuroscience relies on a coming together of different traditions of thought and education. The most fertile questions often arise where physics, mathematics, biology and data science meet.”
Fresh momentum for long-term partnerships
The scouting program allows both women to approach talented researchers who had not previously considered Bonn or a Humboldt Research Fellowship. Mass and Tchumatchenko are both speakers for the Life and Health Transdisciplinary Research Area (TRA) at the University of Bonn, which allows the momentum injected by the freshly recruited researchers to have an effect beyond their own working groups. Existing research alliances can also be enlarged, and questions of relevance to multiple faculties can be tackled.
Although a Humboldt Research Fellowship allows its holder to stay for between six months and two years, Tchumatchenko believes that its impact lasts much longer than that: “A research stay is bound to come to an official end at some point, but the academic links you’ve made will endure. Individual visits can grow into long-term partnerships, including with the home institutes or departments of the people being funded.”
A densely packed research environment
Bonn can offer the hand-picked recipients of these fellowships a densely packed research environment. In the field of immunology, for instance, there are close links between the LIMES Institute, the ImmunoSensation Cluster of Excellence and the Metaflammation Collaborative Research Center. For the neurosciences, meanwhile, the Bernstein Node Bonn-Cologne brings together over 50 working groups from the Universities of Bonn and Cologne, the German Centre for Neurodegenerative Diseases and several Max Planck Institutes. This is complemented by having the University Hospital Bonn right on the doorstep and the many varied overlaps between mathematical modeling, experimental research and clinical practice.