Dr. Simon Haas of Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin has been awarded the Lisec Artz Prize, presented as part of the Cluster Science Days event organized by the University of Bonn’s ImmunoSensation2 Cluster of Excellence. Endowed with 10,000 euros, the Prize is competitively awarded to early-career cancer researchers on the basis of a nationwide public call for nominations conducted by the University of Bonn Foundation and the University of Bonn Faculty of Medicine. 

With a total of 11 researchers, the University of Bonn is represented this year in the international ranking "Highly Cited Researchers". According to the creators of the ranking, the individuals on this list of "Highly Cited Researchers" are among the world's most influential one percent of their field.

Jessica Fintzen, a professor at the Mathematical Institute of the University of Bonn and a member of its Hausdorff Center for Mathematics (HCM) Cluster of Excellence, is to receive the prestigious Frank Nelson Cole Prize in Algebra for 2024. She will be presented with the award at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in San Francisco, California in January 2024.

Pediatrician Dr. Andreas Schultz will be the holder of the Endowed Professorship for Global Child Health at the University of Bonn, recently created. Dr. Schultz, who teaches courses in the Global Health master’s degree program, was already head of a working group of the same name at the Institute for Hygiene and Public Health at University Hospital Bonn. The professorship has been endowed by the Else Kröner-Fresenius Foundation (EKFS), which will be providing parallel funding for a collaboration partner of Dr. Schultz working in the developing East African country of Malawi: the pediatrician and Associate Professor Dr. Ajib Phiri.

The University of Bonn has received a National Education for Sustainable Development award, presented by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research and the German Commission for UNESCO. The award comes as recognition for the University of Bonn’s exemplary progress in Education for Sustainable Development (ESD).

Artificial intelligence (AI) is on the rise. Until now, AI applications generally have “black box” character: How AI arrives at its results remains hidden. Prof. Dr. Jürgen Bajorath, a cheminformatics scientist at the University of Bonn, and his team have developed a method that reveals how certain AI applications work in pharmaceutical research. The results are unexpected: the AI programs largely remembered known data and hardly learned specific chemical interactions when predicting drug potency. The results have now been published in "Nature Machine Intelligence".

Having German citizenship means different things to boys and girls with an immigration background. Christina Felfe, Professor of Economics at the University of Konstanz, will be giving an online public talk (in German) about these differing impacts, to be held at 5 pm on Tuesday, November 21. Held in German, the event is part of the ReStart Talks series organized by the ECONtribute Cluster of Excellence, a joint initiative of the Universities of Bonn and Cologne.

With the establishment of a new Bonn-St Andrews Joint Appointment scheme the strategic partnership between the Universities of Bonn and St Andrews has reached a new level of cooperation. Through joint appointments, the two internationally renowned universities create added value for both institutions that is greater than the sum of its parts. The first four researchers in the scheme have now started into their three-year positions. The next round of joint appointments is imminent.