Current News

We congratulate Marie Revellio (Literature), winner of this year´s Manfred Ulmer Scholarship, and welcome her as Associated Fellow at the Zukunftskolleg. The Manfred Ulmer programme is open to doctoral students of all disciplines at the University of Konstanz and pays 1,000 euros per month over six months. It enables the scholars to bridge a financial gap between their studies and their doctoral phase. Marie Revellio´s PhD project is entitled “Quid facit cum psalterio Horatius? (Hier. epist.…

On August 5, a Munich court and prosecutors agreed to drop the charges against Formula 1 chief Bernie Ecclestone. To put an end to his bribery trial he has to pay a 100 million Dollar fine and thus will not have to go to jail. Ecclestone's lawyer denied that the payment was a circumvention of justice and assured that it is common for settlements to be made in cases such as these. “It is not a deal. It has nothing to do with purchasing freedom”, he insisted. Zukunftskolleg Alumnus Georg Jochum…

Game inventor and Zukunftskolleg Alumnus Steffen Bogen was awarded the “Spiel des Jahres 2014” for “Camel Up” – a game for the whole family that is easy to learn and in which the players have to bet who wins. It is already the second time that Steffen Bogen wins the award: in 2012 for his game “Schnappt Hubi!”.
Read more at: http://www.faz.net/aktuell/gesellschaft/spiel-des-jahres-kamele-machen-das-rennen-13045456.html

We congratulate Philip Leifeld who won the Award for the Best Paper of an Early Career Scholar for the paper “National Parliamentary Coordination after Lisbon: A Network Approach” (authors: Philip Leifeld and Thomas Malang). The prize was awarded at the 1st European Conference on Social Networks (EUSN) in Barcelona, Spain, on July 3rd, 2014; prize money were 500 Euros: http://jornades.uab.cat/eusn/content/winners-eusn-2014-conference-awards-p-leifeld-r-vacca

Albert Kümmel-Schnur´s current installation “Signal-to-Noise-Ratio. Ein Hörsturz“ is shown in the framework of the exhibition „Sounds - Bilder hören, Geräusche sehen“ in the Antonierhaus in Memmingen (http://mewo-kunsthalle.de/ausstellungen/sounds.html). It can be visited until September 7, 2014. More information about Albert Kümmel-Schnur can be found at www.stoertebeker-noise.de, a cooperation between Albert Kümmel-Schnur and Manuel Stettner.

Two Fellows from philosophy, Magdalena Balcerak Jackson and Julia Langkau, were successful at applying for funding of a Colloquium on “Imagination and Fiction”. The German Association of Analytic Philosophy (GAP) has selected the event which will bring together philosophers working on the imagination and our understanding of fiction, as one of the few official colloquia of the next international meeting of the association in Osnabrück in 2015.

Zhongbao Jian met German´s Federal President Joachim Gauck and the president of the Alexander von Humboldt-Foundation Helmut Schwarz during a meeting of Humboldt scholars in Berlin. Zhongbao Jian holds a Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship since July 2013. A picture can be downloaded here.

In its last meeting on June 5, the Executive Committee decided about the winners of the Mentorship programme (application deadline was on May 15). We congratulate Federica Basaglia (Philosophy) who will be mentored by Piero Giordanetti from the University of Milan; Tobias Henschen (Philosophy) who will be mentored by Julian Reiss from Durham University; Philip Leifeld (Politics and Public Administration) who will be mentored by Skyler J. Cranmer from the University of North Carolina, Chapel…

Acting on behalf of the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft the Zukunftskolleg awards the Manfred Ulmer Scholarship to a doctoral student every year. The programme is open to doctoral students of all disciplines and pays 1,000 euros per month over six months. It enables the scholars to bridge a financial gap between their studies and their doctoral phase. Deadline for the current call for applications is July 15, 2014.
More information:

http://www.profil.uni-konstanz.de/stiften-und-foerdern/s…

In an interdisciplinary project funded by the Zukunftskolleg Margarita Stolarova and Tanja Rinker together with their students Corinna Wolf and Aenne Brielmann could demonstrate, how reliability and agreement of ratings need to be analyzed and reported, in order to prevent misinterpretation of results in clinical and educational research. They published a methodological paper that deals with widespread shortcomings in assessing inter-rater agreement and reliability, common in many disciplines,…

In collaboration with German, Italian and Spanish researchers Daniele Brida worked on the fundamental physical mechanisms that lead to charge generation in organic photovoltaic solar cells (trivially they can also be called “plastic solar cells”). Read more in the following paper:

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/344/6187/1001.full

The Zukunftskolleg is warmly welcoming Senior Fellow Irene Heim from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, USA. She has been nominated by Doris Penka and will be our guest until June 6, 2014. Irene Heim is Professor of Linguistics and Head of the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is one of the most renowned scholars working on the semantics of natural languages.

We congratulate Roxana Halbleib whose application at the WIN-Kolleg of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities was granted. Her project „Analyzing, Measuring and Forecasting Financial Risks by means of High-Frequency Data" will be funded for 3 years, starting in June 2014.

The Zukunftskolleg happily welcomes two new colleagues in the Central Office since Monday, May 5.
Magdalena Delucis is our new Program Manager for Internationalization. In succession to Nani Clow, Magdalena coordinates the Marie Curie 'Zukunftskolleg Incoming Fellowships' program, is responsible for the ZIF Research Fellows and covers strategic issues related to EU-funding and internationalization. She can be reached under phone 5686, via email under magdalena.delucis@uni-konstanz.de or in her…

Emmy Noether Group Leader and Zukunftskolleg Research Fellow Andreas Thum was accepted in the international guest researchers programme of the Janielia Farm Research Campus, which is part of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) in Washingten, D.C., USA. Andreas Thum's project about the perception and processing of sensory information and its influence on behaviour in Drosophila larvae will be supported with a grant of 100.000 US Dollar. We congratulate Andreas Thum and wish him all the…

During the first Jour Fixe in summer term 2014 on April 24, the assembly of members elected Monika Class as new member for the Executive Committee. She replaces Doris Penka whose term of office ended after 2.5 years. We congratulate Monika Class and thank Doris Penka very much for her work in the Executive Committee.

We congratulate Barbara Hausmair who will receive this year's Grete-Mostry-Dissertationspreis for her disseration at the University of Vienna. The price is awarded by the university's Department of History and Cultural Science, marking outstanding doctor's theses that expand the current state of research with both profoundness and innvovative strenght. Barbara Hausmair started her Fellowship at the Zukunftskolleg in April.

We congratulate Dominik Wöll who accepted a W1-Junior Professorship with tenure track at the Institute for Physical Chemistry at the RWTH Aachen University. He will start working there in June this year. He thanks the Zukunftskolleg and the people standing behind it for supporting his career and for all the benefits he received during his Fellowship. “In particular I liked the familiar atmosphere; further the interdisciplinary environment provided a lot of interesting insights into the…

We welcome Brendan Balcerak Jackson (Philosophy), Thomas Böttcher (Chemistry), Denis Gebauer (Chemistry) and Michael Pester (Biology) as new Research Fellows at the Zukunftskolleg. Further we welcome Unai Atxitia (Physics), Monika Class (Literature) and Maite Crespo Garcia (Psychology) as new Postdoctoral Fellows.  As the first of a total of eight Postdoctoral and six Research Fellows that were selected in the last call for applications, they started their Fellowship in March.

In the final Workshop on Future Research Directions, held on 23-24 January 2014, the Recruitment Committee decided to offer six out of 14 final candidates applying for a 5-year Research Fellowship a position at the Zukunftskolleg. We welcome our new members.

We congratulate Andreas Thum and Daniele Brida who are funded by the Elite-Programme of the Baden-Württemberg Foundation.
Read more in the following press release: http://www.aktuelles.uni-konstanz.de/presseinformationen/2014/9/

We congratulate Thomas Voigtmann who has been offered a W2-Professorship in “Theory of Soft Matter” in the Department of Physics at the University of Düsseldorf. Thomas Voigtmann is a Research Fellow since April 2009. We wish him all the best!

Helping is an important aspect of human prosocial behavior which has received increasing attention in recent years. However, need-of-help recognition, one socio-perceptual process preceding helping behavior, has not been investigated before. Possible reasons for this lack of attention to an important precondition of helping are difficulties in operationalization and a lack of appropriate, standardized stimulus material. Aenne Brielmann and Margarita Stolarova have therefore developed and tested…

On December 13th, the Recruitment Committee held its second meeting to select 7 new 2-year Postdoctoral Fellows for the Zukunftskolleg. On the same day, they chose 14 finalists applying for a 5-year Research Fellowship to invite to the “Workshop on Future Research Directions” on January 23-24, 2014.
In its most recent call for applications (closing date for applications was September 30, 2013), the Zukunftskolleg received more than 100 applications for the 2-year Postdoctoral and 5-year Research…

We congratulate Malte Drescher who received a Heisenberg Stipend from the German Research Foundation (DFG) for his research group on “Electron Spin Resonance” in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Konstanz . Only researchers who fulfil all the requirements for tenured professorships may apply for the Heisenberg Programme. The stipend is funded for 36 months and will start in February 2014.

We congratulate Andrea Lailach-Hennrich who was successful in applying for a research grant within the “Ontario-Baden-Württemberg Faculty Mobility Program” of the Ministry of Science, Research and the Arts Baden-Württemberg. From September 2014 until February 2015 she will work in the Kant Research Group at the University of Western Ontario, Canada, on her project “The Synthetic A Priori”.

On November 22, on the occasion of the "21. Regionales Wissenschaftsforum" in Tuttlingen, Stefanie Neupert (Biology) was awarded this year´s Manfred Ulmer Scholarship. The Manfred Ulmer programme is open to doctoral students of all disciplines at the University of Konstanz and pays 1,000 euros per month over six months. It enables the scholars to bridge a financial gap between their studies and their doctoral phase. Furthermore the winners benefit from their integration as Associated Fellows in…

On the occasion of the „Kinderuni Hochrhein“ on November 20, Aline Steinbrecher explained German and Swiss pupils the history of human-animal relationships. In her talk “Schimponauten und Schoßhunde – wie Tiere Geschichte machen“ she spoke of dogs and monkeys and their significance for space research, but also the necessity of farm animals. Read more about it here:

http://www.badische-zeitung.de/neues-fuer-kinder/keine-welt-ohne-tiere--77249460.html