Research

Research Profile: The University for the Information Society

The University of Paderborn stands both for modern education and innovative research. With its mission as a "University for the Information Society", Paderborn embodies the concept of a modern profile university. The decisive pooling of resources in the catalogue of its subjects and disciplines in its five faculties of Arts and Humanities, Business Administration and Economics, Science, Mechanical Engineering, and of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, and Mathematics leads to a concentration of the research activities in all those fields that are of fundamental importance to the continuing development of the Information Society.

Since the complexity of scientific questions today requires ever more and greater collaboration between various disciplines, the university focuses on interdisciplinarity. This opens up potentialities for networking information, communication, culture and technology. This includes close links between computer science and engineering, for example, in engineering the commercial exploitation of information technologies with concrete added value, for example in mechanical engineering and electrical engineering. Through such close collaboration, the basic research oriented research in the natural sciences delivers, inter alia, an indispensable basis for shaping the modern information society, including in the fields of optoelectronics and photonics. At the same time and parallel to this, these interdisciplinary contexts aims to address, analyse and understand questions from the cultural sciences and humanities, and from economics and business administration, which are also discussed within the scope of teacher and vocational training research.

A further core feature of the research activities at the University of Paderborn is seen in the Uni's close collaboration with business and industry. In many fields, university and industrial partners work together successfully. The research laboratories - C-LAB, L-LAB, s-lab and DMRC are funded jointly by the university and industrial companies. Numerous consortial projects are carried out with industrial partners. Major research projects, such as the Neue Bahntechnik Paderborn (RailCab) combine basic and applied research with success. To pool and enhance the complementary potential of science and industry, the university plans to establish a cluster with a regional orientation and international radiance in research and development under the heading of "Zukunftsmeile Fürstenallee".

The research priorities at the university are expressed in the Collaborative Research Centre "Self-Optimising Systems in Mechanical Engineering", the contribution to the Transregio Collaborative Research Centre "SFB/TR TRR 30 - Process-integrated manufacturing of functionally graded structures on the basis of thermo-mechanically coupled phenomena," several Research Units and four Research Training Groups of the German Research Foundation (DFG). The winter semester 2009/2010 will see the International Graduate School of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia replaced by an NRW Research School. In addition, the faculties and central research facilities will carry out their own "in house" projects supported by the DFG, BMBF, BMWi, the EU and other sponsors and funding agencies. With an annual externally-funded budget of more than 35 million euros, the University of Paderborn regularly comes among the top group in the research rankings.

Main fields of research: Intelligent Technical Systems and Light constructions