With a video message, Rector Prof. Dr. Ursula Staudinger at the beginning of the year to the members of the TU Dresden: "In the Extended Rectorate we want to put the motto 'TUD universitas' in 2021. We want to contribute to our universitas becoming even stronger in 2021 and being able to renew itself. This concerns research, teaching, transfer, administration and values alike."

Dear TUD members.

We thought a few words to start off would do us all good.

In 2021 we want to put the motto "TUD universitas" in the Extended Rectorate.

As members of the TU Dresden, we are members of a research, teaching, transfer and value community, a universitas that is also embedded in an administrative framework or is only made possible by this.

We want to help our universitas to become even stronger in 2021 and to be able to renew itself. This applies equally to research, teaching, transfer, administration and values.

The TUD Research Association has one of the most exciting years in the history of science in Saxony ahead of it. As a scientific community, we are invited to propose a substantial and sustainable contribution to structural change in the Free State of Saxony. The two large research centers advertised in the Saxon Lausitz and in the Central German mining district as well as the coal money infrastructure projects are intended to help Saxony develop innovatively in the future and offer attractive jobs. We at TUD universitas have enthusiastically accepted this invitation and are working together to develop attractive offers with our partner institutions from the DRESDEN-concept alliance.

We hope that the upcoming decisions on the BMBF future clusters, the national research data infrastructure and the two health centers will soon make further contributions.

In the course of 2021, we also want to gain clarity about which cluster of excellence ideas will have the greatest chance of success at the next round of excellence.

In order to keep our research at the top level, we have to become even more attractive for top national and international researchers and we have to make even more active efforts to attract and retain such outstanding scientists.

The hoped-for successes in the competitions just mentioned will certainly make important contributions here.

Just as in 2020 the acquisition of one of the national high-performance data centers and the extension of the Center for Scalable Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence (ScaDS.AI) operated jointly with the University of Leipzig, but also four new SFBs or TRRs have already done so.

In 2021 the Center for Interdisciplinary Digital Sciences (CIDS) will be created as a common platform and nucleus for interdisciplinary, data-intensive research projects.

The TUD teaching community has had exhausting digital months and is still in the middle of the discussion about alternative forms of examination for the winter semester 20/21.

We believe that an important topic for the TUD teaching community for 2021 must be to learn something from the experience of forced digitization in the last two semesters. Building on this, we want to develop a new, hybrid teaching and examination concept that allows different learning types and different life situations for students and teachers to be better addressed. This makes us even more attractive for students and teachers.

We are aware that we as a university also have to make further resources available for this. We want to do that. In the TUD teaching community, however, it will also be a topic that we respond even better to the academic training needs in the 21st century. This includes both the question of adjusting existing courses and expanding our range of courses to include students in later stages of life.

In a nutshell: We want to become more agile in the curriculum.

"TUD universitas" in the 21st century cannot be imagined without passing on knowledge and skills to the economy, but also to the community here in Dresden and in Saxony. Supporting structural change will offer us many opportunities to become active and we will strive for greater visibility through a TUD start-up center.

The establishment of a Green Office and the upgrading of the Environment Commission will contribute to the fact that we will increasingly introduce elements of ecological sustainability into teaching and implement them in our daily practice as an organization in the sense of a real laboratory. Of course, we rely on the numerous results of our research on climate and environmental protection.

As TUD we will also open a "window of opportunity" in the city, which, for example, will make future technologies tangible for the citizens of Dresden and also make offers to protect democracy. Joint projects with the Semperoper or the Dresden Philharmonic should complement these activities.

The further development of our TUD universitas is without a doubt closely linked to the administrative and digital framework conditions at our university.

In 2021, we want to work with you to ensure that this canon of values is not just on paper.

TUD universitas: a top university in research, teaching, administration and its values!

We think this is a motto for 2021 (and beyond) that is worth working for! But we can only do it together with you. Get involved!