TU Dresden (TUD) is taking a path of its own in the Excellence Initiative. On September 1, 2010, TUD submitted a package of proposals which, when implemented, will strengthen the entire university in its academic diversity and further stimulate the synergies between the university’s scientific disciplines. "We deliberately opted for a comprehensive concept that includes all of TU Dresden’s outstanding research fields,” explains the university’s rector, Professor Hans Müller-Steinhagen. “We do not want to change our profile radically; we just want to sharpen our profile and leap into the top national group while preserving our identity. We always think and act in terms of the major triad of Strategy, Structures and Organisational Culture."

Support from the funds of the Excellence Initiative would constitute a very important financial impulse for implementing TUD’s development strategy. “However, we shall also start with these measures if we are not supported,” said Professor Müller-Steinhagen. "However, then it would take much longer and we would have to tap other sources of financing." In March 2011, the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the German Council of Science and Humanities (WR) will make an announcement of which universities may submit full proposals.

TUD’s application package comprises sketches for the future concept, for five excellence clusters and for one graduate school. In mid-September TU Dresden will also submit the renewal applications for its existent excellence activities: the cluster "From Cells to Tissues to Therapies" (CRTD) and the Dresden International Graduate School for Biomedicine and Bioengineering (DIGS-BB).

TUD’s future concept links several special measures for further improving the framework conditions for top research and excellent teaching. These measures comprise:

• strengthening interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary scientific work

• optimising the structures and processes within the university as well as in interplay with partners outside the university

• the DRESDEN concept

• innovative ways to attract the best brains to TU Dresden and to keep them there.

The DRESDEN concept is a core element of TUD’s application in the context of the excellence initiatives. TUD’s unique scientific network, which has been active since early 2009, has an additional 14 partners from four of Germany’s major institutional research facilities, the Fraunhofer-Society, the Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres, which the Dresden-Rossendorf Research Centre will be joining in 2011, the Max-Planck Society and the Leibniz institutes as well as renowned museums and libraries located in Dresden. In August 2010, it also acquired a legal personality as a registered association with official name "DRESDEN-concept e.V.".

The five excellence clusters and the graduate school have been worked out by researchers from scientific fields in which TU Dresden already excels and in which the institutions in Dresden outside the university are likewise strong. While TU Dresden can state the topics of its proposals, it cannot yet go into the details of the sketches it has submitted because this is, after all, a competition.

There are, as just mentioned, two renewal applications in the TUD research area of biomedicine/bioengineering, submitted by Prof. Michael Brand, Prof. Wieland Huttner, and Prof. Gerhard Rödel, as well as a new application from the area of psychology and the neurological sciences, submitted by Prof. Ulrich Wittchen). In the TUD research area of information technology/micro-electronics, Prof. Gerhard Fettweis has coordinated a sketch that deals with the mid-term critical questions of computer aided computation. The area of materials sciences, which is well represented in Dresden, has produced two cluster sketches on the topic of lightweight design and construction (Prof. Werner Hufenbach) and to new paths in magnetism (Prof. Stefan Odenbach) as well as a sketched proposal for a graduate school (Prof. Brigitte Voit), which is thematically closely related to the cluster for micro-electronics and material sciences. The fifth cluster sketch, by Prof. Hans Vorländer, is designed to make Dresden a centre for cultural sciences.

The table provides an overview of the proposals of TU Dresden in phases 1 and 2 of the excellence initiatives (excellence clusters and graduate schools). Further information on the DRESDEN-concept is available under www.dresden-concept.de.

Information for Journalists:
Kim-Astrid Magister, Press Officer TUD
Tel. +49(0) 351 463-32398,


Marlene Odenbach, Communications Manager DRESDEN-concept
Tel. +49(0) 351 463-34520,