Wolfgang Lück, professor at the Mathematical Institute of the University of Bonn and member of the Cluster of Excellence Hausdorff Center for Mathematics, has been awarded the Karl Georg Christian von Staudt Prize by the Otto and Edith Haupt Foundation at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. The foundation honors his outstanding contributions to topology. The award ceremony will take place on June 6, 2025. 

Don Zagier, Director emeritus of the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn and associated member of the Hausdorff Center for Mathematics, was elected as a new member of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei. The Accademia dei Lincei will officially welcome its new members at a ceremony that will take place in Rome on Friday 8 November 2024. 

Heat, dry spells and flooding—the whole of nature is under stress, and potatoes are no exception. As a food staple, there is particular interest in getting potatoes fit for the new climate reality. As part of the EU’s four-year ADAPT project, an international team led by the University of Vienna and involving the University of Bonn has now investigated how this might be done. The researchers have succeeded in defining specific characteristics and molecular reactions that could be crucial for potato cultivation in the future. These latest findings are set to be put into practice in a follow-up project. 

The University of Bonn has been successful twice in the funding line for the Synergy Grants from the European Research Council (ERC) with other partners. The GravNet project is building a global detector network to search for high-frequency gravitational waves. The CeLEARN project coordinated by the Max Planck Institute for Neurobiology of Behavior – CAESAR aims to decode how single cells learn from their environment. The ERC uses Synergy Grants to support research groups in which different skills, knowledge, and resources are brought together in order to tackle ambitious research questions. The projects will receive several million euros of support in the next six years.

Since the beginning of human history, we have surrounded ourselves with textiles. In its multimedia exhibition “Enmeshed and Entwined: Textures of Dependency”, the Cluster of Excellence Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies (BCDSS) at the University of Bonn shows the social interdependencies and asymmetrical dependency relations inherent in one of our oldest cultural assets. At the centre of the exhibition is a large quilt that provides the ‘narrative’ framework for the multi-dimensional story of the ‘textures of dependency’ in a series of “story patches” from different periods and regions. The exhibition can be seen until 20 December at the University and State Library Bonn (ULB) of the University of Bonn and also via a digital exhibition portal.

Whether lying on their back, all-fours position, sitting upright or squatting - women adopt different birthing positions during childbirth. What has not yet been researched is how the respective final birthing position affects the satisfaction of the woman giving birth. Researchers from the University Hospital Bonn (UKB), the University of Bonn and the University of Cologne have now investigated precisely this. In particular, they also took into account whether the choice of birthing position was voluntary. The results showed that it was precisely when this was chosen voluntarily that women were more satisfied. Around three quarters of those surveyed were lying during the birth and were particularly dissatisfied if they felt that they had not made this choice themselves. However, if the expectant mothers had chosen the supine or lateral supine position themselves, the position actually tended to make them more satisfied. The study has now been published in the journal "Archives of Gynecology".

At the University of Bonn’s International Days 2024 from October 15 to 18, everything was about tackling global challenges together, strengthening international cooperation and honoring excellence in research. In addition to the traditional ceremony for the state awards and the DAAD Prize, the Vice Rectorate for International Affairs invited the public to attend a host of info events, talks and workshops. The keynote speech by Harvard professor Homi K. Bhabha, who is a key figure in post-colonial theory, was a particular highlight.

Propofol is used in the operating room to induce anesthesia. To maintain anesthesia, a continuous infusion of the agent via a separate syringe pump is the standard procedure for total intravenous anesthesia. However, this is not entirely sustainable: propofol produces about 45 percent of the drug waste in the operating room, and a quarter of the agent remains unused. Researchers at the University Hospital Bonn (UKB) and the University of Bonn have now shown that an alternative method reduces the amount of waste. Instead of a separate syringe for the induction and maintenance of anesthesia, the researchers were able to show that the use of a single syringe pump for the induction and maintenance of anesthesia is more sustainable: propofol waste could be reduced by between 30 and 50 percent. The study has now been published in the British Journal of Anaesthesia.