What Is a Cluster of Excellence?
As large, collaborative research projects, Clusters of Excellence are intended to help strengthen universities in research-intensive and internationally competitive areas.
Clusters of Excellence provide researchers from various disciplines the opportunity to work together in high-impact fields. They receive funding for an initial period of seven years. In fact, new research projects can be developed within established Clusters, which receive annual funding of up to 10 million euros, even if those project ideas were not part of the original proposal, and instead emerged in the collaborative process.
The Clusters situated at Freie Universität speak to the university’s powerful research reputation as well as the strong ties between our university and researchers elsewhere in Berlin and beyond.
Innovative Interdisciplinary Research
In the German Excellence competition for universities, Freie Universität Berlin won three clusters of excellence. The university is involved in another cluster as a co-applicant. As large collaborative research projects, the clusters are intended to help further strengthen particularly research-intensive and internationally competitive areas of universities.
What is the Berlin University Alliance?
In 2018 the three major Berlin universities along with Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin formed the Berlin University Alliance to create an institutional framework for their collaboration.
They submitted a joint proposal “Crossing Boundaries toward an Integrated Research Environment” in the Excellence Strategy of the German federal and state governments. It was approved in 2019, and the Berlin University Alliance has been funded since November of that year as the only university consortium of excellence. The funding will initially run until 2026 and amount to 144.5 million euros.
