List

New impulse for digitalization research: Berlin's universities have started the new winter semester with five additional professorships at the Einstein Center Digital Future (ECDF).

The DW documentary "Ai Weiwei Drifting" initially aimed to showcase Chinese artist Ai Weiwei's work at Berlin's University of the Arts, but it ended up focusing on much more. It shows China's most famous artist in the western world as a filmmaker, architect, concept artist and sculptor, but also as a father. In light of the refugee crisis engulfing Europe, Weiwei has been working on his own documentary. Human Flow, which is currently in post-production, involved filming in 25 countries, including Afghanistan, Palestine, and Mexico. The film shows the tragedy of people fleeing their homes, thousands of whom have drowned in the Mediterranean Sea. DW authors and directors Eva Mehl and Bettina Kolb accompanied him for 15 months. The nearly one-hour documentary, which was produced in cooperation with Deutsche Welle and the Einstein Foundation and premiered in Berlin, focuses on Weiwei's artistic approach to the refugee crisis. The documentary shows the artist, who was born in Beijing in…

The Einstein Foundation will grant its very first award for outstanding doctoral programmes in 2017. Altogether, the prize money will amount to one million euro and will recognise programmes that employ particularly innovative and successful strategies for supporting and supervising doctoral candidates. Applications may be submitted to the Einstein Foundation between now and 15 June 2016. The prize will be awarded annually. 

Chinese artist Ai Weiwei will begin his teaching activities as Einstein Visiting Professor at the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK) in the winter semester of 2015-16. An inaugural event will take place on 1st November 2015, at 5:00 p.m. At the event, titled “(teaching) ART,” Prof. Ai Weiwei will speak with other lecturers from UdK Berlin about art and the art of teaching art.  “We at Berlin University of the Arts are very happy to welcome Ai Weiwei to our institution this semester. There were good reasons to invite him to UdK Berlin several years ago. Now, we finally had the chance to do so, and from our first conversations, I have high expectations for his work with our students,” said Prof. Martin Rennert, president of the UdK Berlin, at today's press conference. Prof. Dr. med. Dres. h. c. Günter Stock, Chairman of the Executive Board of the Einstein Foundation Berlin, emphasized the significance of Ai Weiwei’s appointment as Einstein Visiting Professor, for Berlin as a center of…

The brand new Internet portal www.doctoral-programs.de now bundles and presents all structured PhD programs in the Berlin region. It allows young researchers from around the world to search for suitable offerings in their discipline – with a selection of over 100 programs. The portal was created as a joint initiative of the Einstein Foundation and the major universities in and around Berlin: Freie Universität Berlin, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Technische Universität Berlin, Universität der Künste Berlin, and Universität Potsdam.  The new English-language portal provides information about the research focus, available scholarships and application deadlines, as well as the number of places for the individual programs. It is mainly intended for university graduates from abroad who would like to learn more about doctoral opportunities in Berlin. The doctoral programs can be found either by entering search terms or browsing an overview of disciplines. Prospective PhD students can also…

Adele Goldberg and Thomas Y. Levin, highly renowned academics from Princeton University, have been awarded “Einstein Visiting Fellowships” for another two years. The program “Einstein Visiting Fellow” of the Einstein Foundation Berlin aims at integrating outstanding foreign scientists into the Berlin research landscape. Goldberg and Levin will each receive 150.000 Euro per year to oversee their own research groups at Freie Universität Berlin until October 2014.  Linguist Goldberg and media scholar Levin first became Einstein Visiting Fellows in November 2010, with groups at Freie Universität Berlin, one of Germany's leading research institutions that were granted excellence status within the country's Excellence Initiative.  Goldberg’s group is part of the university’s Cluster of Excellence “Languages of Emotions”; Levin collaborates with the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies, both institutions founded within the German Excellence Initiative to promote…

The Einstein Foundation Berlin has agreed to fund the creation of an Einstein Center for Mathematics Berlin (ECMath). ECMath will be the first centre in the new Einstein Center programme. An application has been submitted for €8 million in funding for the period 2013-2017.  The funding decision was made based on the recommendation of the Scientific Commission. It was the commission’s responsibility to judge the proposal on its scientific excellence and its importance for Berlin as a research hub. To do this, it invited a group of highly regarded international experts to Berlin to conduct a two-day assessment. The experts attested that the joint proposal put forward by the Technische Universität Berlin, the Freie Universität Berlin, the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, the Weierstrass Institute for Applied Analysis and Stochastics (WIAS) and the Konrad-Zuse-Zentrum für Informationstechnik Berlin (ZIB) was of outstanding international importance. Three successful mathematical…

On 5 December 2011, the Einstein Foundation Berlin awarded its first Einstein Professorships at the TU Berlin.