Biology and Geography

The Faculty of Biology has focused in recent years on three research areas: Medical Biology, Water and Environmental Research, and Empirical Educational Research. These priorities are closely connected with three institutions, the Centre for Medical Biotechnology (ZMB), the Centre for Water and Environmental Research (ZWU) and the Centre for Empirical Research in Education (ZeB). The Faculty currently has 20 research groups.

Measured by the number of research groups, the Faculty of Biology is one of the smaller ­faculties at the University of Duisburg-Essen (UDE). However, through strong partnerships, particularly with the Faculties of Medicine, Chemistry and Engineering and other research institutions, critical mass is achieved for the three research areas. The Faculty sets out to ­conduct research and teaching on scales ranging from biomolecules, cells, tissues and organisms to entire ecosystems. Increasingly, the research groups recruit their young scientists from the Faculty’s own programmes, the Bachelor’s degrees in Biology and Medical Biology, Master’s in ­Biology, Medical Biology, Biodiversity, Environmental Toxicology and Transnational Water Management, and the teacher education programmes for all school levels.

Research groups from the Faculty are involved in several structured programmes, including the Sino-German Transregional TRR 60 (Biochemistry, Bioinformatics), and the new Collaborative Research Centre SFB 1093 Supramolecular Chemistry on Proteins (Speaker: Prof. Thomas Schrader, Faculty of Chemistry, with the participation of eight groups from the Faculty of ­Biology). Scientists from the Faculty coordinate the EU project MARS and the BMBF project ­KuLaRuhr (concluded in 2014). Other appli­cations for ­programmes coordinated by the Faculty are in preparation.