UDE remains a rising star in the international university landscape. In the Times Higher Education (THE) Young University Ranking of the 200 best universities in the world that are 50 years old or younger, it currently ranks 16th. As in the previous year, it remains the best young German university. The awards go to institutions that have developed quickly and successfully in a short time and are considered to be ambitious. For five years now, UDE has been among the top 20 best young universities worldwide and has established itself as a research university in international competition.

It is particularly convincing in the THE citation index, where it takes 103rd place in the overall World University Ranking. In a nationwide comparison, UDE ranks fifth after Heidelberg, Berlin Charité, Ulm and Hohenheim.

THE assesses the most research-intensive universities in the world according to various academic dimensions such as teaching, research, knowledge transfer and international orientation.

Neutralization tests for the novel corona virus are complex and can only be carried out in special laboratories. Scientists at the University of Duisburg-Essen have now developed a new method that is faster, cheaper and can be widely used. A pre-print of the study has already been published to give the scientific community quick access to the method.

The work originated at Essen's Institute of Virology, which is headed by Prof. Dr. Ulf Dittmer. In addition to the virologist Dr. Khanh Le-Trilling, Lara Schöler, an outstanding young researcher and member of Prof. Dr. Mirko Trilling's working group, has been acknowledged as the first author of the publication with equal rights. Lara Schöler is a medical doctoral student who has participated in the ELAN and BIOME excellence programmes and now works in the Research Training Group 1949.

Link to paper

This year it was again a great privilege for the University of Duisburg-Essen to honour the outstanding final achievements of doctoral students and graduates from all faculties and to award the Duisburg-Essen teaching award. Due to the current situation, the event could not take place as the traditional ceremonious social occasion, and thus the prize winners had to be acknowledged using electronic media. The former BIOME graduate member of the Cellular and Molecular Immunology core, Dr. med. Dominik Schöne, was nominated as the Faculty of Medicine's best doctorate for his MD thesis on "Identification of CD8+ T cell epitopes in adenovirus capsid proteins and the analysis of immunodominance hierarchies of adenovirus verses transgene epitopes in adenoviral vector-based immunisation". Our warmest congratulations!

Fuelled by the valuable regional scientific exchange in 2018, the BIOME core on Behavioural and Clinical Neuroscience again joined forces with the SFB 1280/ International Graduate School of Neuroscience (IGSN) at their annual congress this year hosted by the Ruhr University Bochum. Leading experts sharing their latest insights at this high-calibre event were Josue Haubrich (McGill University, Montreal, CA), Johannes Letzkus (Max Planck Institute for Brain Research, Frankfurt, DE), Tina Lonsdorf and Jan Haaker (both University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, DE), Erno Hermans (Radboud University Medical Center, Nijmegen, NL), Dirk Hermans (KU Leuven, BE), Stefan Reber (University of Ulm, DE), Luciana Besedovsky (University of Tübingen, DE), Michael Fanselow (University of California, Los Angeles, US), Katja Wiech (University of Oxford, UK), Maria Lalouni (Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, SE), and Susanne Becker (University of Zurich, CH).

The Clinical Research Core held their retreat this year in Colonia House, Essen. The event was organised by Mona Kimmig. The guest speaker was Susanne Stolpe, who introduced the participants to the advantages of using the Access programme for organising, storing and evaluating data from clinical studies and research. The talk was followed by a trouble-shooting session whereby doctorates could discuss any data management challenges they were currently facing in their studies. Thereafter, a retreat dinner was held at a location in the vicinity.