In the Cluster of Excellence 3D Matter Made to Order (3DMM2O), we pursue the vision of turning digital blueprints into reality using scalable 3D additive manufacturing. This form of shaping matter, in which one locally adds material rather than subtracting it, has become a powerful tool at the macroscale. Our unique selling point is that we bring this technology towards the molecular scale, to answer previously inaccessible questions in the life and engineering sciences and enable new applications.

Our mission is to understand the molecular language of life. How do cells in the body perceive signals in their environment, integrate this information to make decisions, and communicate with one another to coordinate functions in tissues? By developing new tools to control signalling, we strive to accelerate innovation for health and sustainable agriculture.

Human health depends critically on the microorganisms associated with body surfaces, collectively referred to as the microbiome. In a healthy state, these commensal microbes together support important physiological host functions. In contrast, bacterial pathogens cause millions of deaths per year, with rising numbers, driven by antibiotic resistance and limited corporate antibiotic development programs. Preventing the spread and infection by antibiotic-resistant bacterial pathogens (ARBPs) is essential for preserving fundamental medical achievements of the 20th century.

At the Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behaviour, we aim to create a global hotspot for the integrated study of collective behaviour across a wide range of species and across scales of organization. 

Forests cover about 30% of the global land surface and provide many crucial ecosystem services (ESs) such as renewable resources production, climate change mitigation, water retention, promotion of human health, and protection of biodiversity. However, with rapid climate change, unprecedented disturbances, the introduction of non-native and loss of native species, large tracts of forests are developing into novel ecosystems with no analogue in evolutionary history. The extent to which these novel ecosystems can provide desired ESs and protect biodiversity is highly uncertain.

Plants are the foundation of terrestrial life. To ensure survival, plants have evolved effective and versatile strategies that cope with changes in the environment, ensuring robustness, i.e. the maintenance of function despite perturbation. Given increasing anthropogenic pressures on our planet, understanding the mechanisms and limits of plant robustness is crucial for developing effective, knowledge-based mitigation strategies to preserve plant-based ecosystems and ensure agricultural productivity.

The 21st century is an exciting time in human origins research. Rapid methodological advances have revolutionized the study of fossil and archaeological remains, while surprising discoveries have overturned the status quo and upended long-established assumptions. We now know that multiple hominin species, representing a previously unimaginable diversity of human relatives, not only co-existed in time and space, but also interbred repeatedly, questioning traditional definitions of species.

Despite intensive research efforts, we are facing a rapidly increasing number of cancer cases and cancer deaths worldwide. Successes in cancer screening and early detection have meant that some tumors can be detected earlier and treated curatively, but, depending on the tumor disease, 25-50% of all solid cancers are still diagnosed at an advanced, often metastatic stage. Such tumors are complex systemic diseases which, despite a growing number of novel therapeutics, are still incurable in most cases. They are the focus of the iFIT Cluster of Excellence.

The Cluster of Excellence “The Politics of Inequality” investigates how political pro-cesses create, reinforce, or reduce social inequalities. By examining the interplay of perception, participation, and policy, we explore the dynamics of inequality in democ-racies and non-democracies around the world.

The Cluster of Excellence Integrative Computational Design and Construction for Transformative Architecture (IntCDC) aims to lay the methodological foundations for the urgently needed, future-proof and climate-positive transformation of the way buildings are designed and constructed. Based on interdisciplinary and integrative research, IntCDC seeks to harness the full potential of digital technologies to address the severe environmental, economic and social challenges that the building sector is facing. To do so, IntCDC bundles the internationally recognised competencies of the University of Stuttgart, the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems and Bauhaus Earth across the fields of architecture, structural engineering, building physics and engineering geodesy, manufacturing and systems engineering, computer science and robotics, social sciences, humanities and economics.

The vision of the livMatS-Cluster is to merge the best of two worlds, the biological and the tech-nological realm, to develop living adaptive energy-autonomous Materials Systems.

Machine learning is changing science even more profoundly than we imagined only a few years ago. While it has proven useful in tackling individual, long-standing scientific problems, recent developments suggest even more far-reaching possibilities. Foundation models, trained on vast datasets, provide general purpose representations suitable for a wide range of downstream tasks, and have already revolutionized tasks involving language. Diffusion models allow the generation of samples from complex probability distributions, and modern programming frameworks make it possible to implement scientific theories as part of machine learning workflows. Thus, machine learning is creating new possibilities in nearly all stages of scientific discovery and inquiry. At the same time, machine learning methodologies have obvious shortcomings regarding reliability, robustness, and interpretability, and come with risks, challenges, and blind spots.

Energiewende – the energy transition that forms a fundamental tenet of our global economy – faces challenges from limited material availability, extinction of European mining industries, geopolitical threats, and price fluctuations. This is particularly relevant for electrochemical energy storage (EES), a key technology for enabling the use of renewable energy. Alternative EES technologies are needed, which requires coordinated, fundamental research aiming for high-performance, safe, affordable and sustainable solutions. These must be based on diverse and abundant raw materials, enhancing energy security and sovereignty and ensuring a resilient and sustainable energy future.

Since 2019, researchers from the Cluster of Excellence "Data-Integrated Simulation Science (SimTech)" at the University of Stuttgart have been developing a new class of simulation- and data-driven approaches that enhance the applicability and accuracy of simulations, changing the way we conduct science and technology.

The cluster of excellence STRUCTURES explores new concepts and methods for understanding how structure, collective phenomena, and complexity emerge from the fundamental laws of physics. These concepts are also central for finding structures in large datasets, and for realizing new forms of analogue computing.

Bottom-up Synthetic Immunology: New Strategies Against Infection and Cancer. Infectious diseases such as AIDS and malaria, along with hard-to-treat cancers like pancreatic and brain tumors, continue to pose major global health challenges. Despite significant progress, effective preventive or curative measures remain elusive for many of these conditions. A shared feature of these diseases is their ability to evade the immune system—often through similar mechanisms. Yet, targeted interventions to modulate the complex interactions between immune cells and tissues remain limited, and experimental models to study such interventions are still in their infancy.

The air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, and other resources we use, have resulted from interactions between the Earth’s geosphere and biosphere. Understanding these interactions is thus essential for human survival and wellbeing, which are endangered by anthropogenically induced climate and land-use change. While contemporary anthropogenic pressures are unprecedented, the processes and natural laws governing the Earth System remain universal.