In 2018 our university presented its University Development Plan, describing our strategic goals up to the year 2025 in research, teaching, transfer, and administration as well as in the fields of internationalisation, equality and diversity, and digitisation. This strategy revolves around the motto “The Leipzig Way” and aims at interdisciplinarity and the formation of alliances. It highlights what makes our university unique, sets out the most important instruments and parameters for planning our future development, and is a source of orientation and motivation for members of the University.
When it comes to top-class research and medical expertise, we aspire to be one of the leading institutions of higher learning in Germany. With interdisciplinary collaborative structures and a continually evolving research profile, our academic focus is on complex, forward-looking and socially relevant issues of our time.
In order to attract the best students to our university, we rely on the principle of research-led teaching and cultivate our performance-oriented, internationally connected range of courses in line with the framework established by the Bologna Process. We also actively promote the international mobility of our students.
Besides the generation of knowledge, we also define the transfer of that knowledge as a performance marker that shapes the profile of our university and creates competitive advantages. In dialogue with society, we are striving to bring about a diverse pool of knowledge, motivating our university’s members to participate in transfer activities. We are committed to expanding our internationalisation strategy in research, teaching, transfer and administration, and are making a name for ourselves as an institution with excellent international connections.
As a reputable, equal opportunities and family-friendly employer in a prospering city, our university is a magnet for young international academics, attracting bright minds from all over the world.
We see our university as an outward-looking, social place and at the same time as a learning, agile organisation that is able to continue to develop innovative solutions because of its formative experiences of change and upheaval.
Our university’s solution-oriented control and administration processes as well as its robust infrastructures form the necessary basis for outstanding results in research, teaching and transfer.
The Leipzig Way
An integrated programme for research excellence
Our profile is focused on three strategic research fields:
- Changed order in a globalised world
- Intelligent methods and materials
- Sustainable principles for life and health.
Three overarching themes have emerged from the strategic research fields: biodiversity, modern diseases and globalisations. These are bundled in nationally and internationally visible research centres (iCenters) and integrate the humanities and social sciences, the life sciences, medicine and the natural sciences in roughly equal parts.
In opening up new and interdisciplinary fields of research, in the Leipzig Science Network we cooperate closely with the many non-university research institutions which are based in Leipzig as a centre of science, but also with neighbouring institutions of higher education in the Halle-Jena-Leipzig Central German University Alliance.
Our strategic research fields offer significant potential for the development of competitive and excellence-oriented research clusters. By 2025, we will have succeeded in further developing our most important research fields in such a way that they extend beyond the connections or collaborative status of individual Collaborative Research Centres.
Objectives in research until 2025:
The Leipzig Way also describes the dynamic further development of the University’s research profile.
This includes the following stages:
- stimulating, identifying and promoting new research fields (emerging fields),
- the targeted combination of these fields as a nucleus for the acquisition of collaborative projects,
- further development into interdisciplinary research networks with overarching research questions, right the way through to
- the development of internationally visible integrative centres, or iCenters.
The Leipzig Way is geared towards the long term and provides for the establishment of several integrated research centres (iCenters). The formation of the iCenters is independent of the Excellence Strategy of the federal and state governments.
Each centre addresses key societal challenges:
- the dramatic loss of biodiversity (iDiv),
- the obesity pandemic as a disease of modern civilisation (International Reference Centre for Integrative Obesity Research, iOb) and
- the impact of diverse globalisation processes and projects (iGlobe).