23.12.2022
Season's Greetings 2022
In her letter to the alumni of the University of Tübingen, President and Vice-Chancellor Professor Dr. Karla Pollmann looks back on a challenging and eventful year.
Dear Alumni,
A challenging year is drawing to a close and the festive season is just around the corner. I would like to use this letter to introduce myself to you, dear former students, researchers and staff, as the new President and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Tübingen. My name is Professor Dr. Karla Pollmann and I joined the University of Tübingen on 1 October 2022, succeeding Professor Dr. Bernd Engler. Prior to this, I held a dual professorship in Classics and Theology at the University of Bristol where I also served as Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and was a member of the University Executive Board. In addition, I have taught and conducted research, among others, at the universities of Bochum, Bielefeld, Constance, St. Andrews, Kent, and Reading. It is a great honor for me to bring my experience from the UK, and other international academic systems, to the University of Tübingen. Like you, I am an alum of the University of Tübingen, a fact that makes me especially happy to be back at my old university as President and Vice-Chancellor.
Our university looks back on an eventful and research-intensive year. The university has grown by no less than four institutions, allowing us to conduct research at the highest level. New additions include the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS), which offers highly qualified scientists attractive conditions for their research in the field of artificial intelligence; the Research Center for Science for Communication, which helps to communicate scientific findings to society at large; the Tübingen Center for Digital Education, an innovative research and transfer hub for digital education that prepares schools and teachers for teaching and learning in a digital society; and the College of Fellows, which offers international researchers a research, networking and event platform.
Research at the University of Tübingen not only takes place locally, but worldwide. We are, for example, especially proud of a rescue excavation in Iraq in which archaeologists from the University of Tübingen played a major role. Together with other German and Kurdish researchers, our researchers uncovered a city from the Bronze Age and discovered, amongst other things, an archive with over 100 clay cuneiform tablets from the Middle Assyrian period.
We place an equal amount of importance on teaching and learning at the University of Tübingen. We regularly award a teaching prize to honor the work of outstanding lecturers at the university. In 2022, the prize went to Professor Rainer Nagel from the Mathematics Department for his international "Internet Seminar on Evolutionary Equations". For 25 years, Rainer Nagel has been combining digital elements with face-to-face teaching in this seminar: Currently, students from 120 universities worldwide are working on key mathematical topics which change each year.
Our strong focus on cutting-edge research, excellent teaching, and internationalization is paying off, with the result that the University of Tübingen is becoming increasingly popular abroad. In the current winter semester, more than 4,100 international students are enrolled at our university, more than ever before. We will continue to attract outstanding international students to Tübingen since we not only see great potential for the University in this group, but also for the economy and society.
I would like to finish this letter by expressing my sincere thanks to all those who supported the call for donations by the University Association (“Universitätsbund”) in support of refugee students and researchers from Ukraine. In total, the University Association collected an impressive 60,000 euros in donations, which provided five refugee researchers from Ukraine with scholarships. Dear alumni, your generous donations have helped to give these people an academic home in their hour of great need.
Best wishes for a happy festive season and a joyful and healthy New Year. Please feel free to contact me via email at alumni@uni-tuebingen.de with your questions, suggestions or feedback.
Yours sincerely,
Professor Dr Karla Pollmann
President and Vice-Chancellor