The establishment of high-caliber professorships is a central measure of the University of Bonn within the framework of its excellence strategy. To ensure institutional renewal and the further dynamic development of our university, we have established Hertz, Schlegel and Argelander Tenure Track Professorships aimed at strengthening the Transdisciplinary Research Areas (TRAs) as well as the faculties. More information on each program can be found here.

Renowned reinforcement for the University of Bonn: Ethicist Christiane Woopen, agricultural economist Matin Qaim and theologian Klaus von Stosch fill new professorships of excellence. With the first High Profile Professorships financed by Excellence funds, three top-class scientific personalities are coming to the University of Excellence to open up new fields of research and provide important impulses in various disciplines.

Hertz Professorship in 'Life Ethics'

Where are current changes leading us? What values should guide us in shaping our lives?

What is alive, changes. This applies to individual life as well as to social, economic and cultural life and the natural environment. Christiane Woopen explores with her team at the Center for Life Ethics four systemically interacting dynamics that are particularly shaping individual and societal lives of our time: technologization, economization, ecologization and globalization as well as the transformation processes associated with them. Where are they leading us? What ethical attitudes and goals shape theses dynamics, and how can we shape them so that they serve the unfolding of life? The team at the Center of Life Ethics aims at further developing and implementing the approach of life ethics in research, education, and counseling. In life ethics the ethically good means respecting or promoting the flourishing, beauty, and abundance of all life.

How do pollution and climate change affect health and the associated costs? How do People adapt to their environmental conditions, and what factors are crucial for such adaptability?

Julia Mink conducts research at the intersection of environmental and health economics, using large data sets and econometric methods, with the goal of answering complex questions about environmental and climate policy. One aspect she is particularly interested in is the study of inequalities. Exposure to pollutants and the impacts of climate changes are often unequally distributed, with poorer populations usually more affected. Quantifying theses disparities is important in order to make recommendations for possible compensation and redistribution measures. Julia Mink's goal for the next years at the University of Bonn is to further advance her research in the field of environmental and health economics, thereby complementing and expanding the expertise in the field of applied economics available in the Department of Economics and at the IAME. She also plans to continue her involvement in interdisciplinary research, in line with the Argelander Professorship's mission to promote trans- and interdisciplinary research.

What legal options do cities have to be able to complete the transformation to a green, just, productive and healthy city in the sense of the New Leipzig-Charta 2020? What legal limits are they subject to in doing so? What answers do constitutions provide to the question of ecological transformation and the resulting social sustainability challenges?

Jacqueline Lorenzen conducts research on legal issues related to sustainable urban development and examines contexts of necessary transformation processes from the perspective of administrative law and administrative science. In addition, she focuses on the dogmatic and theoretical penetration of climate protection and environmental energy law from a dogmatic perspective, which is characterized by numerous current and dynamic developments and novel individual issues. Since the ecological transformation is increasingly developing into a social sustainability challenge, she also directs attention to the (constitutional) legal management of problems of equality of burdens and distributive justice. The University of Bonn offers her a suitable environment to approach these aspects from an interdisciplinary perspective. She is, for example, working together with other scientists from various disciplines on a joint project on the mid-term and long-term consequences of the Ahr valley flood.