Thomas Böttcher New Member of Junge Akademie

Congratulations to Thomas Böttcher: He is one of ten new members in the Junge Akademie. One artist and nine junior scientists from various disciplines, ranging from biophysics to the history of science, were welcomed at the annual celebration of the Junge Akademie on June 6, 2015. The Junge Akademie was founded in 2000 as a joint project of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. It provides interdisciplinary and socially…

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Edina Szöcsik takes up Position at University of Bern

The Zukunftskolleg congratulates Edina Szöcsik who accepted a postdoc position at the University of Bern, Switzerland. She works within a comparative research project about the strategies of radical right parties, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation for three years.

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Fresnel Prize for Daniele Brida

We congratulate Daniele Brida who was awarded the Fresnel Prize. It is awarded every two years by the European Physical Society for outstanding contributions to quantum electronics and optics made by young scientists before the age of 35. The jury´s motivation for choosing Daniele Brida was: “The 2015 Fresnel Prize for applied aspects is awarded to Daniele Brida, University of Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany, for the development of broadly tunable few-optical-cycle laser sources and their…

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Zukunftskolleg Alumni Cooperation Program

The Zukunftskolleg launched a new funding program that aims to support cooperations between former and current Fellows. The program comes out of the credo of the Zukunftskolleg “once a Fellow, always a Fellow”. Read more here.

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RiSC Grant for Gianluca Rastelli and Denis Seletskiy

We congratulate physicists Gianluca Rastelli and Denis Seletskiy who received a RiSC grant. The Research Seed Capital (RiSC) program is funded by the Ministry of Science, Research and the Arts (MWK) Baden-Württemberg.
Gianluca Rastelli´s project entitled “Many-body interaction and decoherence in superconducting Josephson lattice qubits” is funded for 2 years to the amount of 94.990 Euros – and co-funded by the Young Scholar Fund of the University of Konstanz. Denis Seletskiy receives 99.410…

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DFG Grant for Julián Torres Dowdall

We congratulate Julián Torres Dowdall who received a DFG grant to the amount of 324.400 euros to continue his project “Does side matter? The evolution of asymmetric genitalia in livebearing fish”. “In the next three years the research money will be used to do next generation sequencing to answer three questions”, explains the biologist. “1. What are the phylogenetic relationships between Anablepidae fish? 2. Does genital asymmetry result in genetic divergence between asymmetrical morphs? 3. Can…

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The Younger, the More Innovative?

Working at the Zukunftskolleg can lead to more innovative topics – at least according to a study entitled “Age and the trying out of new ideas”. Economist Mikko Packalen from the University of Waterloo in Canada and economist Jay Bhattacharya from Stanford University in California conducted an analysis of more than 20 million biomedical papers published over the past 70 years. They found that young researchers are much more likely than older scientists to study exciting innovative topics.…

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Ilja Serzants takes up Position at University of Mainz

The Zukunftskolleg congratulates Ilja Serzants who accepted a postdoctoral position at the Johannes-Gutenberg-University of Mainz. In February 2015 he started working as Principal Investigator in the TriMCo project: Triangulation Approach for Modelling Convergence with a High Zoom-In factor. It aims to uncover the multi-factorial mechanisms leading to the rise of linguistic areas.

More information: https://www.trimco.uni-mainz.de/

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Denis Seletskiy successful in Elite Program of Baden Württemberg Foundation

We congratulate Denis Seletskiy who has been accepted into the Baden-Württemberg Foundation‘s elite program for postdoctoral students. For his project „Ultrafast Spectroscopy of Laser Cooling Cycle in Bulk and Nanoscale Solids“ he will receive 113.000 Euro for a duration of 3 years, co-funded by the Zukunftskolleg. Thanks to the funding he will be able to cover personnel and equipment costs.

More information about the Elite Program: http://www.bwstiftung.de/bildung/programme/hochschule/elitepro…

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A Perfect Birthday Present

On time to its first birthday the Center for Multilingualism received a nice present: Its application for a transfer platform „Multilingualism in kindergartens and schools“ to the amount of 162.680 Euro was granted. The project was initiated by Tanja Rinker and Janet Grijzenhout and will be funded by the Excellence Initiative for two years. The goal is to increase and promote multilingualism in educational institutions. “We will collaborate with practitioners from kindergartens and schools. In…

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Words or Numbers?

Interdisciplinary, international, intergenerational and inter-institutional: a cooperation that started in 2011 involving researchers from the Zukunftskolleg and the Center of Excellence “Cultural Foundations of Social Integration” at the University of Konstanz resulted now in the volume “Berechnen/Beschreiben. Praktiken statistischen (Nicht-)Wissens 1750‐1850.” The editors are the Zukunftskolleg Fellows Gunhild Berg and Zsuzsanna Török, as well as Marcus Twellmann from the Center of Excellence.…

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Emmy Noether Grant for Daniele Brida

We congratulate Daniele Brida who was successful in applying to the Emmy Noether program. He will receive 1.65 million Euros for his project “Femtosecond dynamics in layered materials”. It is about the study of fundamental processes excited by ultrashort light pulses in materials like graphene. The idea is to observe interactions between photoexcited electrons in systems characterized by the fact that are confined in two dimensions. The project duration is 5 years.

More information on the Emmy…

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ERC Starting Grant for Sarang Dalal

We congratulate Sarang Dalal who has received an ERC Starting Grant in the amount 1,5 Million Euros. His 5-year project is called “The retinae as windows to the brain: An oscillatory vision”. “In this project, we will examine in detail how neural oscillations in the human retina code visual information and facilitate communication with cerebral cortex for further processing”, explains Sarang Dalal. “The retina is not simply a sensor, but performs rather sophisticated processing of visual input…

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Nina Schneider Comments on Final Report of the Brasilian Truth Commission

The radio station Deutsche Welle Brasil published an interview with Nina Schneider, in which she provides a first assessment of the final report of the Brasilian Truth Commission that was released on December 10, 2014. She expects that the research activities about the military regime (1964-1985) will continue.

Many families of the disappeared continue lacking information about the whereabouts and circumstances of death of their loved ones disappeared during the dictatorship. The Truth…

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More Visibility for the German Parliament

Ulrich Sieberer and Dominik Hierlemann, on behalf of the Bertelsmann Stiftung, have conducted a study on the performance of the German Parliament: the way it debates, the media coverage of these debates, and their perception by citizens. The study finds that parliamentary debates seem to be quite boring for the public, thus media report poorly about them, and as a consequence people know very little about the work and the decisions taken by their representatives. On the other hand citizens’…

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Lead Agency Grant for Andreas Thum

Andreas Thum – in cooperation with Dorit Merhof from the University of Aachen and Katja Bühler from the Centre for Virtual Reality and Visualization (VRVis) in Vienna – has received a grant from the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) in the amount of about 1.1 Million Euro. Their joined approach aims at establishing a 4D reconstruction of the entire larval brain (about 10.000 neurons). The project will be realized by their synergistic expertise in the field of…

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Eleanor Coghill takes up Position in Zurich

The Zukunftskolleg congratulates Eleanor Coghill who accepted a position at the University of Zurich. In February 2015 she will start working as Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the inter-departmental project “Sprache und Raum” (Language and Space). Nevertheless she will still be in Konstanz and continue her project at the University of Konstanz.

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New Calls for Applications of the Zukunftskolleg

The Zukunftskolleg offers new calls for applications for Interdisciplinary Collaborative Projects and Transdepartmental Collaborative Teaching. The call for interdisciplinary research projects aims to promote research collaboration within the Zukunftskolleg or between a Fellow of the Zukunftskolleg and other researchers. It gives grant holders the opportunity to identify and explore new, innovative and/or risky research perspectives with neighbouring disciplines and across disciplines.
The…

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Result of Successful Collaboration at the Zukunftskolleg

A cooperation born at the Zukunftskolleg between Doris Penka and Chiara Gianollo now resulted in the publication “Language Change at the Syntax-Semantics Interface” (ed. Gianollo, Chiara; Jäger, Agnes; Penka, Doris):

http://www.degruyter.com/view/product/314115

They thanked the Zukunftskolleg for its support: “It's safe to say that this book definitely wouldn't exist without the Zukunftskolleg. First of all, it originated out of the collaboration that we started at the Zukunftskolleg. The…

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Erwin Wenzl Prize for Barbara Hausmair

We congratulate Barbara Hausmair who has won the Erwin Wenzl Prize of the state of Upper Austria for her dissertation “Am Rande des Grabs. Todeskonzepte und Bestattungsritual in der frühmittelalterlichen Alamannia“. The prize is honored with 2.500 Euros. The award ceremony will take place in Linz in December.

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Heisenberg Stipend for Brendan Balcerak Jackson

We congratulate Brendan Balcerak Jackson who received a Heisenberg Stipend from the German Research Foundation for his research project “Semantic Structure and the Structure of Rationality”. Only researchers who fulfil all the requirements for tenured professorships may apply for the Heisenberg Program. The stipend is funded for 36 months, with the possibility of a 24-month extension.

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Guidebook für Postdocs

Mirjam Müller from the Academic Staff Development of the University of Konstanz has written a book on „Promotion - Postdoc - Professur. Karriereplanung in der Wissenschaft“ („Doctoral Studies – Postdoc – Professorship. Career Planning in Academia“) that was recently published:

http://www.campus.de/promotion_postdoc_professur-8559.html

It serves as reference book for Postdocs in the German-speaking region und describes backgrounds and factors of success for a scientific career between doctoral…

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Italian Art in Common Room

Next time when you enter the Zukunftskolleg common room (Y 329) and you are surprised by the masks in the glass cabinet: They result from this year´s University Day in the Humanities focused on Fine Arts and the theatre of Early Modern Italy. Julia Boll, who offered a workshop, and her students prepared a short play in line with the principles of the “Commedia dell’arte,” using the roles and characters this form of Italian theatre provides. In the cabinet you can see the Venetian masks called…

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172 Applications for 2-year and 5-year Fellowships

In its current call for 2- and 5-year Fellowships (the closing date for applications was August 31, 2014), the Zukunftskolleg received 172 applications. In its first meeting on October 1-2, the Recruitment Committee will choose the finalists for the ZIF-funded 2-year Postdoctoral Fellowships and the 5-year Research Fellowships, funded by both the ZIF-programme and the German Excellence Initiative. The Recruitment Committee will hold its second selection meeting for six 2-year Postdoctoral…

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Klaus von Heusinger New Member of Academia Europaea

Senior Fellow Klaus von Heusinger was appointed as member in the section Linguistic Studies at the Academia Europaea. The institution that was founded in Cambridge in 1988 aims at promoting education and research in Europe as well as strengthening interdisciplinary and international scientific exchange. It consists of about 3.000 members coming from 35 European and eight non-European countries which includes leading experts from the physical sciences and technology, biological sciences and…

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Temporary Professorship for Daniel Summerer

Daniel Summerer has accepted a Temporary Professorship in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Konstanz. From October 1, 2014 until March 31, 2015 he will be standing in for Prof. Dr. Ulrich Groth in Organic Chemistry with Focus on Chemistry of Natural Materials, Aromatic and Heterocyclic Compounds. It is already the second time that he has been offered this position, last time in winter term 2013/14.

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