The Bonn–St Andrews Joint Academic Appointments Scheme, now in its third year, continues to strengthen the strategic alliance between the University of Bonn and the University of St Andrews. This innovative partnership initiative allows colleagues from both universities to spend 20 percent of their time over three years teaching and conducting research at the partner institution.

Two Collaborative Research Centers (CRCs)—Transregio (TRR) 224 “Economic Perspectives on Societal Challenges” and TRR 228 “Future Rural Africa”—have secured four more years’ funding from the German Research Foundation (DFG) and are thus set to enter their third funding period. The first project, CRC-TRR 224, sees researchers from the Universities of Bonn and Mannheim collaborating to open up new economic avenues for some of the challenges facing society, while the second, CRC-TRR 228, involves researchers from the Universities of Bonn and Cologne working on shaping the future in rural Africa.

Finding somewhere to live at the start of the semester remains a major challenge for many students in Bonn. Even though the winter semester has already been under way a few weeks, many young people are still hunting for an affordable room. This is especially true of international students, who often arrive just before the semester starts and have hardly any time to mount a detailed search. The University of Bonn, the Studierendenwerk Bonn and the General Students’ Committee (AStA) are therefore issuing an urgent joint appeal to all private landlords and landladies in the city, asking them to offer up their available accommodation to students. A new online housing platform has also been launched for this purpose.

Only ten teams nationwide will receive exclusive access to the European exascale supercomputer. With the HoMe project, AI research in Bonn is sending a strong signal in the fields of vision, robotics, and generative AI.

A slight drizzle commences inside the University of Bonn auditorium—and then a real storm breaks out. Yet everyone in the audience remains safely dry. Choir director Jan-Hendrik Herrmann encourages the audience members to snap their fingers and gently clap their hands together or on their laps. This auditory storm is unleashed by the University of Bonn Jazz Choir with their opening piece for the evening: “The Secret Garden”, by Aurora.

At the first Bonn Impact Pitch Night, five teams from the region presented their public welfare-oriented start-up ideas at the Digitalhub. The ideas competition aims to raise the profile of innovative, promising solutions to current social, economic, and environmental issues. Third place went to “Phyusical” producer Dr. Jana Heysel from the University of Bonn with her Science Music Show concept. The event is part of the “SoNaR” (“Social entrepreneurship, sustainable impact: Impact Cluster Region Bonn-Rhein-Sieg”) project organized by the University of Bonn, the Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences (H-BRS), and Alanus University.

The Shanghai Global Ranking of Academic Subjects for 2025 was published yesterday and puts the University in the top 10 in Germany for 12—over half—of the subjects assessed. In five of these subjects, it has even made it into the top five.

Dr. Varun Venkataramani of the Faculty of Medicine at Heidelberg University and Dr. Niklas Klümper of the University Hospital Bonn have been awarded the Lisec Artz Prize for their outstanding cancer research. The University of Bonn Foundation and the University of Bonn Faculty of Medicine presented the awards to the two researchers at the University Hospital Bonn (UKB) as part of the Cluster Science Days event held by the ImmunoSensation² Cluster of Excellence. The prize is worth a total of 15,000 euros.