Early next year, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) will be setting up 21 new priority programmes. This was decided at the DFG Senate's spring session. The new priority programmes were selected from 54 applications and are to be supported with an overall funding volume of around 104 million marks, raising the total number of promoted priority projects to 129. The priority programmes aim at bringing together scientists and scholars from various research institutions and research areas. As a rule, a priority programme is promoted for a period of six years.
The new programmes in detail:
HUMANITIES
In the priority programme Executive Functions, psychologists and medical scientists look at how human cognitive processing is controlled and co-ordinated. Executive processes are key characteristics of intelligent systems and are involved whenever a system processing information has to switch from one cognitive requirement to another at short notice or when processes of perception and action control need preparing.
Population research was of strategic importance to politics in National Socialism. How could not only individual scientists but an entire branch of research become embroiled in the machinations of the Third Reich? Just how population research altered its theoretical foundations and abused methods as pseudo-scientific "proof" of ideological positions is what the priority programme Causes, Types and Consequences of the Construct "Population" before, during and after the Third Reich looks at. It involves historians, social scientists and demographers.
BIOLOGY AND MEDICINE
Patients with a diseased organ or even an organ failure require transplants. However, modern medicine is still faced with a lack of donor tissue and donor organs. Stem cells that scientists of the priority programme Embryonal and Tissue-specific Stem Cells: Regenerative Cell Systems for Cell and Tissue Replacement deal with are opening up new prospects
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Contact: Dr. Pia Teufel
pia.teufel@dfg.de
49-228-885-2376
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
15-May-2000