research

Awarding of the right to confer PhDs – a landmark occasion

Why do we conduct research? Because we want to understand our world and identify where problems lie and how we can solve them to make our future sustainable and worth living. COVID, climate change, war or growing social inequalities – in times of crisis, independent research is particularly important because it provides orientation so that we do not succumb to mere opinions, manipulations and fake news.

The greatest challenge of our time is the socio-ecological transformation. The diverse research at H-BRS contributes to the success of this transformation by combining knowledge-based and application-oriented research. Transformation requires evidence-based and ethically-reflected research so that despite all the changes in our society, people remain in solidarity, mindsets remain open and our democracy remains resilient.

A landmark occasion for the universities of applied sciences was the awarding of the right to confer doctorates to the jointly supported Graduate School for Applied Research in NRW on 17 November 2022. This is also a recognition of the outstanding research achievements of H-BRS.

The right to confer doctorates ensures that students can follow a direct path to a PhD through their studies at H-BRS as a matter of course. For many years now, the H-BRS Graduate Institute and its scholarship programme have been creating the structures necessary to support researchers during the early phases of their career.

The further development of research at H-BRS is also reflected in the increasingly frequent interdisciplinary cooperation projects throughout the university, which successfully conduct research together with partners at home and abroad. In terms of topics, in addition to the university’s established areas of research, forward-looking and rapidly growing research is emerging in the life sciences as well as in cross-disciplinary molecular modelling.

We cannot foresee the future, but strong research at Hochschule Bonn-Rhein Sieg will help us to navigate it better.

Prof. Dr Remi Maier-Rigaud, Vice President for Research and Young Academics