Uljana Wolf has been appointed the 13th Thomas Kling Lecturer in Poetry at the University of Bonn and will hold her inaugural public lecture, entitled “Ferngespräche mit Muttersprache”, in the University of Bonn’s Grand Hall at 7 pm on Monday, May 13, 2024. The poet and translator from Berlin is regarded as one of the most significant and distinctive poets of her generation, and her works have won multiple awards.

How much progress has the University of Bonn already made with internationalization, and where is there still room for improvement? The University asked itself these questions for the first time in 2017 when it passed the “Internationalization of Universities” audit organized by the German Rectors’ Conference (HRK). The University’s Rector Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Michael Hoch and its Vice Rector for International Affairs, Prof. Dr. Birgit Ulrike Münch, received a certificate from the HRK earlier today confirming its successful completion of the re-audit. The implementation of around 140 action points has been discussed, supported and evaluated together with experts from the HRK between 2018 and 2024, with a very positive outcome.

Prof. Dr. Daniel Boyarin is Hermann P. and Sophia Taubman Professor Emeritus of Talmudic Culture at the University of California, Berkeley. The philosopher and scholar of literature, language and religion will visit the University of Bonn between May 14 and 15 2024; he will give a lecture with the title “Towards a Poetic of Midrash: Skepticism and the Reading of Torah”, on Wednesday May 15, from 11 am to 1 pm. The day before, Professor Boyarin will hold a workshop for students and members of the teaching staff. Both English-language events have been organized in cooperation between the Faculty of Catholic Theology at the University of Bonn and the Luxembourg School of Religion & Society. 

BNTrAinee, a project funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and based at the University of Bonn, is developing AI-supported answers to specific research questions and is forging links between the University’s computer science teams and all manner of other subjects. This collaboration is now beginning to bear fruit, with computer science students joining forces with historians to create an algorithm that can help analyze old newspaper articles.

Mental health is an increasingly important public health issue in the European Union. Effective treatment options are in greater demand today than ever before. Roughly one percent of the world’s population suffers from schizophrenia, and the limitations of current medicine are apparent in that 30–50% of patients do not properly respond to the available medication. This is where the four-year Virtual Brain Twin project comes in, backed by roughly €10 million in European Union funding. The University of Bonn Center for Life Ethics is a project member, serving as a review instance of attendant ethical questions. The project kick-off meeting was just held in Brussels. 

Drones monitoring fields for weeds and robots targeting and treating crop diseases may sound like science fiction but is actually happening already, at least on some experimental farms. Researchers from the PhenoRob Cluster of Excellence at the University of Bonn are working on driving forward the smart digitalization of agriculture and have now published a list of the research questions that will need to be tackled as a priority in the future. Their paper has appeared in the “European Journal of Agronomy.”

Dendritic cells play an important role in setting the course of our immune system. However, what determines their heterogeneity and functional specialization is still not sufficiently understood. An international collaboration consisting of researchers from the University Hospital Bonn (UKB), the University of Bonn and the Technical University of Denmark, among others, has investigated the role of the transcription factor Bcl6 in dendritic cells in a mouse model and discovered that a subgroup is highly dependent on this protein. The findings contribute to a better understanding of immunological processes during infections, vaccinations, allergies and autoimmunity. The results have now been published in the renowned scientific journal "Nature Communications".

Many bacteria produce substances to gain an advantage over competitors in their highly competitive natural environment. Researchers at the University Hospital Bonn (UKB), the University of Bonn and the German Center for Infection Research (DZIF) have discovered a new so-called lantibiotic, namely epilancin A37. It is produced by staphylococci that colonize the skin and acts specifically against their main competitors there, the corynebacteria. This specificity is presumably mediated by a very special mechanism of action, which the researchers were able to decipher in detail. Their results have now been published in the renowned ISME Journal.