QUEENSLAND'S GERMAN CONNECTIONS - PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE

Global reputation

The University of Queensland (UQ), as the oldest university in the state, has established and maintained deep, long standing links and shared interests with Germany. The University signed its first partnership agreement with University of Tübingen in 1987, celebrating 25 years of cooperation in 2012, and has since developed strong German institutional, industry and government partnerships. A significant number of German academic and research staff who are experts in their field, a thriving student exchange program, a large cohort of German students on campus, a growing and active alumni and two dedicated staff members on the ground in Germany ensure that UQ’s engagement in Germany can only develop and improve exponentially in the future. Over the past decade, UQ has been the institution of choice for almost 1,300 German students at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, and more than 90 postgraduate research students. UQ’s community of prestigious alumni include graduates such His Excellency Mr Peter Tesch, Australian Ambassador to Germany, Switzerland and Liechtenstein. Through an active student exchange program, UQ students are given the opportunity to engage with the international community by spending a semester or two abroad at one of UQ’s partner universities. In the past five years, more than 50 UQ students have studied at a German partner institution as part of their degree. UQ is a founding member of the Australian Group of Eight (GO8) alliance. A highly ranked institution placed among the top 100 in the Academic Rankings of World Universities (ARWU) UQ is above world standard in more fields of research than any other Australian university – Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) 2010. Background: panoramic view over the Neckar valley across Tübingen, the traditional university town where one in three of the population of 90,000 is said to be a student. In 2012, UQ celebrates a quarter-century partnership with Tübingen.

Given the University’s strong global reputation, UQ is well placed to engage in the five global challenges set by the German Federal Government’s High-Tech Strategy for Germany 2020 which focuses on the areas of climate/energy, health/nutrition, mobility, safety and communication and matches capabilities with our partners in Germany in excellence and innovation in science, research and education as well as continuing to share and collaborate in cultural endeavours. UQ has established a number of key institutional relationships in Germany. Its recent targeted engagements place a heavy emphasis on post- graduate, research-based and research-linked projects. Collaborations in Neuroscience, engineering and architecture have most recently progressed significantly on these grounds along with pharmacy and drug-delivery, biotechnology and preventive medicine yielding some exciting and groundbreaking results. Our most highly engaged institutional partners have all had a significant degree of success in the German Excellence Initiative. In addition to broad and deep collaboration with 17 German Institutional partners, UQ has close alliances with the German Research Foundation (DFG), the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), The Max Planck Institute, the Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres and the the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (AvH). UQ has a distinguished list of Humboldtians past and present and currently hosts more than 30 scholars who are carrying out research projects as guests of the University. The University of Queensland fosters research collaboration of the highest quality between Australian researchers from Go8 universities and German Researchers through the Go8 Germany joint research cooperation scheme. The scheme which is a joint initiative of the GO8 German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), Germany’s national agency for the support of international academic co-operation has seen many projects awarded generous funding.

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