Over the past years, the Dresden International Graduate School for Biomedicine and Bioengineering (DIGS-BB) has become a flagship among Germany’s international graduate schools. Originally founded in 2006 as one of the first graduate schools awarded by the German Excellence Initiative of the federal and state governments, the DIGS-BB secured continued funding in the second phase after an in-depth evaluation by international experts. The success of the DIGS-BB was an essential step for the TU Dresden toward receiving the status as one of eleven German Universities of Excellence in June 2012.

Top-notch research and expert training in a highly interdisciplinary setting are hallmarks of the DIGS-BB. Together with its partner, the International Max Planck Research School for Cell, Development and Systems Biology (IMPRS-CellDevoSys), the DIGS-BB represents 4 scientific tracks under the roof of the Dresden International PhD Program (DIPP):

• The “Regenerative Medicine” track (RegMed) links basic molecular and cellular research with translational and clinical studies, and includes stem cell biology, molecular medicine, regenerative biology and translational research.
• The “Biophysics and Bioengineering” track (BioPhysEng) has two foci: First, Biophysics to tackle basic cell biological questions from a biophysical point of view. Second, Bioengineering using the wide variety of molecular functions provided by nature’s “nanomachines” for innovative, biomolecule-based nanotechnology.
• The “Cell and Developmental Biology” track (CellDevo) focuses on the study of molecular mechanisms in eukaryotic cells and their role in tissue formation, with the level of analysis ranging from single molecules to single cells, from cells to tissues, and from tissues to whole organisms.
• The “Computational Biology” track (CompBio) performs fundamental research in computational and theoretical areas in order to develop the methodological foundations for future biology in tight integration with the experimental approaches of the other tracks.

About 200 PhD students are working on their thesis projects in more than 80 research groups at TU Dresden, the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG), the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems (MPI-PKS), the Leibniz Institute of Polymer Research (IPF) and the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR).