Two new Research Training Groups will be funded in Berlin. Technische Universität Berlin is the speaker university for a new international Research Training Group “Stochastic Analysis in Interaction” where stochasticians from Berlin will be collaborating with colleagues from Oxford. Together researchers from Technische Universität Berlin, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, and the University of Oxford will supervise a group of doctoral candidates. This integrates the international Research Training Group seamlessly into the new academic partnership between the University of Oxford and the Berlin University Alliance initiated last year. Another new Research Training Group “Rethinking Quantum Field Theory” will be set up at the Adlershof campus of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. The projects will each be funded with just under four million euros for an initial four and a half years. The researchers will take up their work in April 2020. The German Research Foundation (DFG) approved funding for 16 new Graduate Training Groups nationwide, as the DFG announced on November 11.

Next year, within the Research Training Group “Stochastic Analysis in Interaction,” 13 doctoral candidates will begin research in Berlin. Together with a similar number of doctoral candidates in Oxford, they will be supervised by 25 researchers in Berlin and Oxford: five at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, eight at Technische Universität Berlin and the Weierstrass Institute, and twelve at the University of Oxford. They will deal with methods of stochastic analysis, which have become indispensable in many fields of application. They are used in different ways, for example, in physics or intensive care medicine as well as the calculation of risks in the financial world.

The Research Training Group “Rethinking Quantum Field Theory” is being hosted by the Institute of Physics and the Integrative Research Institute for the Sciences (IRIS Adlershof) of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. The participating researchers will address urgent theoretical questions and significant innovations in quantum field theory (QFT) that go beyond established methods. The Research Training Group will be supported by 12 scientists, and it will include all the working groups in theoretical particle physics at the Institute of Physics.

The cooperation partners are the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics and the Helmholtz Center DESY. The spokesperson is Prof. Jan Plefka at the IRIS Adlershof. Valentina Forini, Prof. Dirk Kreimer, and Prof. Matthias Staudacher from IRIS Adlershof are also involved.