Today (11^th February 2019), Technische Universität Dresden (TUD) welcomed His Royal Highness Prince Edward, Duke of Kent. As part of his visit to Dresden, he was particularly interested in gaining an impression of the scientific work conducted at Saxony's largest university and East Germany's only University of Excellence with the exception of Berlin. Moreover, TU Dresden also has close ties to British universities.

The transCampus London – Dresden is a unique joint campus that transcends national borders. This one of a kind initiative is continuously expanding. The two leading universities, King's College London and Technische Universität Dresden, have recently extended their cooperation to the field of materials research. transCampus was launched in 2015 as a research alliance with a focus on medicine and biotechnology, later supplemented by communications technology.

The Duke of Kent, as Chancellor of the University of Surrey, accompanied by the British Ambassador Sir Sebastian Wood, wanted to familiarise himself with this strategic partnership between KCL and Dresden's researchers. In the foyer of the "DFG Center for Regenerative Therapies Dresden" (CRTD) of TU Dresden, they were cordially welcomed by Prof. Hans Müller-Steinhagen, Rector of TUD, Prof. Gerhard Rödel, Vice-Rector for Research, and Uwe Gaul, State Secretary of the Saxon State Ministry of Higher Education, Research and the Arts. At various exhibition stands, the Duke of Kent gained insights into the development of regenerative therapies, into models of neurodegenerative processes in the eye, into clinical diabetes research and into materials research at the “Dresden Centre for Computational Materials Science (DCMS)”.

© Marc Eisele/Universitätsklinikum Dresden

"Today, science is no longer bound by national borders, international exchanges have become the norm and a driving force for pioneering developments," emphasised the Duke of Kent. H. R. H. and TUD Rector Prof. Hans Müller-Steinhagen know each other personally from their time spent together at the University of Surrey, where Müller-Steinhagen was Professor and Institute Director for Chemical Engineering and Process Engineering from 1993 to 2000 and Dean of the School of Chemical, Civil and Environmental Engineering from 1997 to 2000. "Great Britain is one of the world's leading scientific locations with outstanding universities. We have had close ties for many years through trusting and successful research cooperations. Comparable scientific thinking, excellent research infrastructures and the absence of language barriers are important safeguards of these cooperations. In addition, the UK is a popular destination for our students for their semesters abroad and internships," states the Rector of TUD. "Today’s visit by the Duke of Kent is a great honour for us and it makes us hopeful that we will continue to maintain a close scientific partnership with Great Britain". This sentiment was mirrored by Sir Sebastian Wood: “I am delighted to visit TU Dresden for the second time. transCampus is an innovative and successful project that exemplifies the well-functioning and close scientific connections between Great Britain and Germany. It is an active embodiment of the exchange between our countries.”

H. R. H. Prince Edward, Duke of Kent, will also attend the award ceremony of the 10^th Dresden Peace Prize at the Semperoper on 11^th February 2019 and present the award sculpture to this year's laureate Kim Phuc Phan Thi. The Duke received the Dresden Prize in 2015 and was honoured for his contributions to the British-German reconciliation. Since 1994, he has been the patron of the British Dresden-Trust organisation, which, among other things, donated the tower cross for the Dresden Frauenkirche.

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