TUD’s Rector Ursula Staudinger and Shitij Kapur, Principal & President of King’s College London, had their first meeting in person. Besides the fact that both are psychologist, psychology is also one of the most successful research areas within the transCampus initiative. This summer, the International Research Training Group on affective disorders started with its first PhD cohort, giving the longstanding collaborations a new framework and ambitious goals. The leadership team of the two partner universities met to discuss primarity future alliance opportunities, especially in in engineering. Angela Rösen-Wolff, Vice-Rector Research, and Bashir al-Hashimi, currently dean of the Faculty of Mathematics, Natural Science and Engineering, and future vice-president (research) at King’s intensively discussed how such future collaboration could look like. The rector and vice-rector were accompanied by Stefan Borstein, Giovanni Cuniberti, Gerhard Fettweis and Virginia Kamvissi-Lorenz, transCampus COO.

The basis of the successful development that the transCampus has taken over the years is the many research projects in various disciplines. They often start small and then grow to sustanaible research networks. The annual call of the transCampus funding programme has the objective to support such initiatives. For 2023, eight proposals have recently received a positive feedback: New tC projects will be established, for example, in engineering, with topics such as the effects of gravity on human physiology, or the integration of all voltage levels to the electricity network. In medicine, three proposals are granted, one of those will analyze new possibilities to prevent dementia. Another project focus on innate immune mediators in order to improve treatment in haematology. Collaborations in industrial management and stochastics give PhD students exchange opportunities and to benefit from the different expertise at the partner institutions. All project descriptions can be found on the TUD website.