A major new research project led by the University of Augsburg with the Technical Univer-sity Munich (TUM) as partner is dedicated to a key topic of the future: the research and de-velopment of new types of materials whose properties are characterised by quantum ef-fects. In the long term, they could serve as the basis for very powerful computers. The University of Augsburg is involved in another three Collaborative Research Centres.

Together with Munich, Augsburg is home to a new site of the German Centre for Mental Health. The aim of the new centre is interdisciplinary research into the development and progress of mental illnesses across the lifespan. The Augsburg site of the new centre will focus on researching treatments for depression. Funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), the new centre (DZPG) consists of five research sites in addition to Munich/Augsburg.

The University of Augsburg has appointed historian Prof. Dr Simone Müller, an expert on global environmental history and environmental humanities, as new DFG Heisenberg Professor. The sought-after historian, who works in an advisory capacity for the Polish National Science Council, the Academy of Finland, and the Swedish Research Council, researches globalisation processes and the relationship between ecology and economy. In 2017, she was nominated by the German Research Foundation as a leading researcher in her field (Academia.net).

Since the 1st of May, the University of Augsburg’s music education institute has been newly named the Leopold Mozart College of Music (LMC). The institute has recently re-orientated itself and revised its degree programmes. The newly launched bachelor degree programme in music aims to better prepare students for a career in music and will start in the coming winter semester. The master’s degree programme will start in the following year.

The Faculty of Business and Economics at the University of Augsburg awarded an honorary doctorate (Dr. rer. pol. h. c.) to the former Federal Minister of Finance, Dr Theo Waigel, in a ceremony at the Augsburg Town Hall.

Discourse research spans a broad range of themes, including questions of educational justice, environmental problems, problems associated with the pandemic, as well as identity conflicts and migration. From the 30th to the 31st of March, leading researchers will meet at the University of Augsburg for the international conference “The Discursive Construction of Reality V,” organised by the Chair of Sociology. Alongside research, the conference will celebrate the 10th anniversary of the “Zeitschrift für Diskursforschung (ZfD),” which was founded in Augsburg.