Berlin University Alliance

The Berlin University Alliance is a consortium of three universities and one hospital in Berlin: the Free University of Berlin,[1] the Humboldt University of Berlin,[2] the Technical University of Berlin,[3] and the Charité – Berlin University of Medicine.[4] The four partners joined forces to further develop Berlin as a research hub with international drawing power.[5]

In 2019 the Alliance has won funding of 24 million euros per annum in the Universities of Excellence funding line of the Excellence Strategy for its future concept ‘Crossing Boundaries toward an Integrated Research Environment’.[6][7]

In the Excellence Strategy research competition run by the German federal and state governments, the following seven Clusters of Excellence of the Alliance have been approved.[8] As of 2019, the interdisciplinary research projects are each being funded in the Clusters of Excellence funding line for seven years with up to ten million euros per annum.[9]

• MATH+: The Berlin Mathematics Research Center[10]
• Matters of Activity: Image Space Material – A new culture of material[11]
• NeuroCure – New perspectives in the therapy of neurological diseases[12]
• SCIoI – Science of Intelligence – Learning to understand intelligence[13]
• Scripts – Global challenges for liberal democracy as a model of organization[14]
• Temporal Communities – A global perspective on literature[15]
• Unifying Systems in Catalysis (UniSysCat) – Sustainability needs catalysis research[16]

Artificial intelligence research institutes:

• The Berlin Institute for the Foundations of Learning and Data (BIFOLD),[17] the largest BMBF Competence Center for Machine Learning[18]
• The Alliance is one of the German National High Performance Computing locations[19]

The capital's universities are in particular demand among researchers from abroad. Partner universities of the Berlin University Alliance fill top positions in latest Humboldt Foundation Rankings.[20]