Background

Freie Universität Berlin and the University of Zurich signed a strategic partnership agreement in April 2017, intensifying their already close cooperation. As part of the alliance with the University of Zurich, new and existing collaborations between the two universities will systematically be promoted and expanded. The agreement calls for an increase of cooperation on all university levels: in the continuous promotion of young researchers, the initiation of innovative research cooperations, the development and establishment of future-oriented teaching, as well as in the structured exchange of researchers and students, and on the administrative level. In order to achieve these goals, specific funding programs will be established which are jointly coordinated by the two universities.

With over 25,000 students, the University of Zurich is the largest university in Switzerland and one of the leading European research universities.

Highlights

The Strategic Partnership is characterized above all by the diversity of existing research cooperation and joint research projects, which extend across all disciplines. Particularly noteworthy are joint research projects in the natural sciences, neurosciences and psychology. There is, for example, an intensified cooperation between the Berlin Focus Area DynAge and the University Research Priority Program Dynamics of Healthy Aging at the University of Zurich. Institutionalized cooperation can also be found in the humanities and social sciences, for example in the DFG Research Group Diskursivierung von Neuem, which took up its work in 2016, and in the partnership between the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies and the UZH Doctoral program in German and Nordic Philology.

Funding Opportunities

• Swiss-European Mobility Program
• UZH Global Strategy and Partnerships Funding Scheme

Partnership Coordinator

Nora Jacobs, Center for International Cooperation, Tel.: +49 30 838 73949, Email: nora.jacobs@fu-berlin.de