The Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies (BCDSS) investigates well-known forms of de-pendency – such as Roman, transatlantic or Mamluk slavery, forced labor and debt bondage – as well as less visible forms, such as human trafficking and domestic servitude.

The construction sector consumes vast amounts of energy and resources, and is a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. It also suffers from low productivity and strenuous working conditions, while facing labor shortages and having a severe impact on the environment in terms of waste, noise, and other emissions. To mitigate global warming while still providing people with affordable homes and infrastructure that are resilient to the consequences of climate change, the construction industry requires a disruptive transformation.

In recent years, cyberspace has embraced an ever-larger share of our lives, and the notion of the digital society has become a reality. At the same time, we observe massive qualitative and quantitative shifts in the cybersecurity landscape. The attack surface has expanded dramatically, with adversaries targeting a broad range of entities, including hospitals, government services, higher education institutions, and critical infrastructure. This is further aggravated by the evolution of nation-state attackers pursuing geopolitical goals such as election interference. Finally, the emergence of disruptive technologies like generative AI, quantum computing, and the growing popularity of blockchains and cryptocurrencies further amplifies the digital risks. This dramatic change in the cybersecurity landscape poses a fundamental threat to our society, jeopardizing democratic processes, critical infrastructures, and citizens’ privacy and well-being alike.

Today’s world is witnessing an ever-increasing number of older people. Aging is the primary risk factor for diabetes, cardiac, kidney, neurodegenerative, and skin diseases – among others. This dramatic demographic change poses enormous health and socio-economic challenges for societies, highlighting the urgent need to foster a healthy aging agenda.

Climate change and the depletion of natural resources threaten global food security and ecosystem stability. The Cluster of Excellence on Plant Sciences (CEPLAS) addresses these great challenges through fundamental research on complex traits of plants and associated microbiota (holobiont) that impact adaptation to limited resources and environmental change. This knowledge is key to CEPLAS’s long-term goal of predicting plant performance and enabling the design of SMART plants with novel traits and improved environmental adaptation.

Questions about the nature of matter and the fundamental forces, about the history of the Universe and the origin of everything we observe have always been at the core of human curiosity. Today, the Standard Model of Particle Physics describes the interactions between the fundamental building blocks of matter, the quarks and leptons, but leaves several central questions unanswered: What is the mechanism behind the formation of matter by the strong „color“ force? How did the asymmetry between matter and antimatter in the Universe emerge and how is it related to the different „flavors“ of quarks seen in the weak interaction? Are there yet unknown particles or forces?

The dynamic evolution of our Universe is regulated by nonlinear physical processes that occur on vastly different timescales, from fractions of a second to billions of years. How are they interconnected to shape the Universe?

ECONtribute’s goal is to break new ground in the analysis of markets & public policy. Motivated by pressing societal challenges, ECONtribute has advanced a new perspective in the first funding period by incorporating manifold ways of human thinking and acting into analyses of markets and policies. This includes drawing on notions of fairness, social preferences, beliefs, and expectations to explain market behavior, guide effective market and policy design, and the development of tools to assess the distributive implications of policies.

The Cluster of Excellence Hausdorff Center for Mathematics (HCM) promotes cutting-edge research in mathematics and its applications, establishing Bonn as a focal point for leading international scholars. HCM’s research program encompasses a broad spectrum of mathematics, ranging from groundbreaking foundational work to applications in industry and medicine.

Immunology is fundamental to human health and thus highly relevant to society. ImmunoSensation has become an internationally visible immunological center with strong collaborative ties to leading institutions worldwide and has made numerous contributions to immunology, particularly innate immunity. Its innovative scientific concept of the immune system as a sensory system is now an accepted paradigm and immune sensing a widely used term.

The vision of the Internet of Production (IoP) is to enable a new level of crossdomain collaboration by providing semantically adequate and context-aware data from production, development and usage in real-time, on an adequate level of granularity.

The Cluster "Mathematics Münster: Dynamics – Geometry – Structure" advances cutting-edge research by implementing integrated approaches to solve fundamental problems across various mathematical disciplines. These approaches combine different techniques, perspectives, or fields of expertise to address challenges comprehensively.

The Cluster of Excellence “Matter and Light for Quantum Computing” (ML4Q) launched its scientific program in 2019. Its goal is to develop the foundations of a comprehensive quantum technology with computing and networking functionality. Leading researchers from the Universities of Cologne, Bonn, and Aachen, together with Forschungszentrum Jülich, are bundling their expertise in the fields of solid-state physics, quantum optics and quantum information to decisively advance this future-oriented field.

PhenoRob represents a sustainable, technology-driven transformation of agriculture. The Cluster of Excellence addresses the central challenge of making crop production more efficient, resource-conserving, and sustainable at the same time. The aim is to explore new pathways for future-oriented crop production through novel technology-driven approaches and interdisciplinary collaboration.

The Cluster of Excellence “Religion and Politics. Dynamics of Tradition and Innovation” at the University of Münster has been investigating the complex relationship between religion and politics across epochs and cultures since 2007. The 140 researchers from 10 countries and more than 20 disciplines in the humanities and social sciences are particularly concerned in the funding phase from 2019 to 2025 with the “dynamics of tradition and innovation”.

RESOLV pioneered Solvation Science as an interdisciplinary research field. Solvents are no longer understood as mere bystanders but have been recognized to play an active and decisive role in chemical processes. RESOLV provides a cohesive framework and innovative techniques, many of them developed by us, for understanding and controlling solvent-driven processes. Exploiting the transformative power of Solvation Science is key to address urgent scientific and societal challenges, such as transitioning from fossil to sustainable carbon and energy sources for chemical feedstock production.

The future will be renewable! Shaping a post-fossil era mandates the development of disruptive technologies for the production and use of liquid energy carriers and chemical products as basis for a truly sustainable energy-chemistry nexus within the planetary boundaries. Energyrich molecules harnessing renewable energy jointly with renewable material feedstocks offer an important contribution to the defossilization of the transport sector. This applies especially to long-haul, heavy duty, and non-road applications, which are difficult or even impossible to electrify, yet have significant contributions to the total energy demand. At the same time, energyrich molecules are essential components for a net-zero production of chemicals serving as the foundation for nutrition, health, and prosperity.