Prof. Dr. Christian Büchel, Director of the Institute for Systematic Neurosciences at the Medical Center Hamburg- Eppendorf (UKE), has been granted the Leibniz Prize. Prof. Büchel is one of ten researchers to receive the 2.5 million euro award in March. The prize was granted for his fundamental research on neuronal network characteristics significant to complex brain processes such as learning, memory, language, fear and pain. Read an interview with Prof. Christian Büchel. Or learn more Weitere Informationen hier...
The European Research Council has approved a 2.4 million euro grant for a research project at Universität Hamburg on the human brain's learning capacities. The project will officially begin on 1 December 2010. The ERC thereby recognizes the previous achievements of Dr. Brigitte Röder, head of the Office of Biological Psychology and Neuropsychology, Universität Hamburg. The funding comes from the ERC funding program "Advanced Investigators Grant" in the social sciences and humanities category and is awarded for a five-year period. More...
Thirteen scholars from various schools of Universität Hamburg are represented in„AcademiaNet“ which was activated by Chancellor Angela Merkel on Tuesday, 2 November, in the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences. With the aid of this databank, scientific and political decision-makers have better access to the profiles of excellent academics. More...
Researchers in the Department of Pre-historical and Early Archaeology at Universität Hamburg tested new archaeological technology in the spring and summer of 2010: they used a terrestrial 3D laser scanner in the north of Portugal in order to measure the Roman gold mine of Tres Minas and to investigate its construction history. In a pilot project, the Hamburg research group discovered that the "Galeria dos Alargementos" mine was built more quickly than inititally believed. More...
Funding for the German-Chinese research training group "Cross-modal Interation in Natural and Artificial Cognitive Systems" (CINACS) was extended on 1 October 2010 to 2015. The German Research Foundation evaluated CINACS' work and authorized the second funding phase with approx. 2.9 million euros. CINACS' main goal is to understand the principles of interaction among various senses such as seeing, hearing and touching and to realize these in robot systems in order to make human-computer communication possible. More...
Starting immediately, the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF)will fund a consortium of international scientists coordinated by Universität Hamburg with four million euros. The interdisciplinary project, "The Future Okavango," will investigate how natural resources along the Okavango River in southern Africa can be sustainably exploited and fairly distributed. Four institutes of the university are involved: soil science, botany, ethnology and geography. Mehr...
In the Hamburg environmental wind tunnel, Europe's largest, wind conditions in the city will be analyzed for the first time. In the upcoming weeks, scientists from the KlimaCampus at Universität Hamburg will be conducting research using a model with proportions of 1:350. They will focus on security and climate effects. Joining the KlimaCampus are the Federal Office of Population Protection and Distaster Relief (BBK) as well as Hamburg's Office of the Interior. Mehr... 
The German Research Foundation research training group 1286, "Tailored Metal Semi-Conductor Hybrid Systems" at Universität Hamburg will enter its second funding period on 1 Cotober 2010. This year, the German Research Foundation deemed the group "excellent" and it will fund the group in the upcoming four-and-a-half years with more than 4.8 million euros. Semiconductors consisting of a combination of normally-conducting metals, supra-conductors and Ferro-magnets will be formed to create hybrid systems (combinations) with revolutionary functions. More... 
Since mid-August, the Russian expedition "SoJaBio" under the direction of Dr. Marina Malyutina, Institute of Marine Biology in Vladivstok, is travelling on the Russian research ship "RV Akademik Lavrentyev" in the Japanese deep seas in order to investigate species diversity on the ocean floor in this as-yet completely unexplored area. 
A team of researchers from Universität Hamburg and the Spanish research center IMDEA Nanoscience has succeeded in chemically producing material which organizes itself by cohering into two-dimensional nanostructures.
Fish populations are not only affected by fishing quotas but by the climate. For example, heavy rains will wash more fresh water into the Baltic Sea. At the same time, deep-water influx from the North Sea will most likely decrease. Both phenomena lead to lower salt concentration in the Baltic Sea. The habitats of fish such as cod are threatened as a result. 
Two expeditions into inhospitable regions, the Komi Republic and the Lena Delta, will attempt to explain how moors react to climate changes. Prof. Lars Kutzbach of the KlimaCampus at Universität Hamburg, his team and German and Russian partners will begin conducting research on 15 July 2010. They will investigate the complex interplay between hydrological processes and the carbon cycle of northern wetlands. It is feared that wetlands emit more carbon in the form of green-house gasses due to global warming. The current analyses will supply important information contributing to risk assessment and the understanding of green-house gasses. Current climate models exclude moors despite their size. More... 
At the Universität Hamburg, research in nanotechnology is being conducted intensively in several departments simultaneously: chemisty, physics and medicine work together closely in this field of research. Two state clusters of excellence at the Universität Hamburg are devoted to the topic of "Nano," making the Universität Hamburg one of Germany's most important "nano" research locations. In order to illustrate its activities in Hamburg, a film, contracted by the Academy of Sciences and the Excellence Cluster "Nanotechnology in Medicine," has now been produced to familiarize the larger public with nanotechnology and the manifold possibilities for its application. More... 
Who washes the dirty laundry? How to explain the increase in the housework performed by men? Why do German women do so much more housework than Swedish or American women? 
Multilingualism in daily life has long become standard. In a society in which many cultures are at home, and in an increasingly interconnected economic world, experience with foreign languages should be normal for everyone, from kindergarten teachers to the employees of large companies to German doctors. What opportunities do multi-lingual societies provide, what challenges do they face? These are the questions which the transfer area of the multilingualism collaborative research center and partner institutions investigate at the Universität Hamburg. 
In January 2009, the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg established a State Excellence Initiative in order to strengthen and promote research cooperation between the Universität Hamburg and other universities, institutes and partners. The Universität Hamburg successfully applied for a total of 11 projects. Six of these are state excellence clusters and five are state graduate programs. The interdisciplinary projects conduct research in many different fields. 
How do volcanic eruptions affect the climate? Until now, scientists assumed that eruptions with high sulfur-dioxide content reaching far into the atmosphere led to the creation of aerosols. These aerosols could in turn cool the earth. Another effect - the fertilization of ocean algae - has now been investigated by researchers in the "Integrated Climae Analysis and Prediction" (CliSAP) Excellence Cluster at the University of Hamburg. Their initial findings have now been published in the scientific journals "Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics" and the "Journal of Geophysical Research." "In many parts of the ocean, the growth of algae is limited by a lack of iron - among other things. Iron salts in volcanic ash can lead to the proliferation of plankton and bind large quantities of C02," according to Dr. Bärbel Langmann, Institute for Geophysics. The algae metabolically incorporate the green-house gas, removing it from the atmosphere. More... 
At the Center for University and Continuing Education at the University of Hamburg, researchers are looking into the workload of students following conversion to the bachelor and master system. At the same time, measures to improve the situation are being developed and implemented. The first intermediate results of the project, which was launched in 2009, are now available.
As the prestigious British journal "Nature Nanotechnology" has reported, an international research team at the University of Hamburg has used scanning tunnelling spectroscopy on a chain of cobalt atoms to tackle spin-sensitive measurements ("spins" are magnetic moments of electrons). Surprisingly, the measurements revealed that at atom's observable form depends upon its magnetic orientation. This is the first research world-wide to combine spin-sensitivity with the technology of atomic manipulation (Foto: A. Kubetzka) More... 
As the Web 2.0, or the "join-us" net, grows more successful, the behavior of many Inernet users has changed radically. Glimpses into the private sphere, one's day or circle of friends constitute both the web's main contents and its voyeuristic thrill. But publicizing private information can be risky for Internet-users and its long-term consequences are frequently underestimated. On 8 and 9 March, the first conference of the "Young Scholars' Network on Privacy & Web 2.0" took place. The network, which is comprised of 15 international researchers funded by the German Research Foundation, discussed current trends and developments in the private sphere in the Internet. Leading the conference were junior professor Sabine Trepte and psychologist Leonard Reinecke from the Dept. of Psychology at the University of Hamburg. More... 
For 10 days, Dr. Stefanie Kaiser took samples on the research ship RRS James Clark Roos in the Antarctic Ocean and made some interesting discoveries: among other things, the British Antarctic Survey team in Cambridge was able to take pictures of the 10 cm Antarctic ray so rarely seen in the Antarctic Ocean that some scientists believed it was already extinct. The marine biologist's peculiar research subject are actually isopoda, or more exactly, microscopic isopoda which live on the floor of the Antarctic Ocean. Alongside crabs, snails and worms, isopoda are typical inhabitants of the sea floor and they are very revealing objects of study when it comes to the Antartic's bio-diversity and colonization history. Dr. Kaiser, who works at the University of Hamburg's Zoologische Museum, is a specialist for bio-diversity in aquatic ecosystems.(Photo: Pete Bucktrout) More... 
Since 2009, the Historical Seminar in the Faculty of Humanities at the UHH has had an Emmy Noether young scholars group from the German Research Foundation (DFG), headed by Dr. Astrid Windus, investigating the topic "Text, Image, Performance: Change and Ambivalence in Cultural Orders in Colonial Contact Zones in the 17th and 18th Centuries." The five-year research project's special focus is the analysis of cultural transformation processes within Spain's colonial empire.
