With Humboldt University arrangement, Princeton now has strategic partnerships on 3 continents

The University has finalized a strategic partnership with Humboldt University in Berlin that will promote international research and teaching initiatives between the two institutions. The partnership, which the University announced on Monday, is one of three strategic partnerships — the other two with the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil and the University of Tokyo — that were launched in the past year.

The program will promote and fund joint research projects between faculty from both institutions to encourage international cooperation across many disciplines, according to history professor and director of Council for International Teaching and Research Jeremy Adelman.

“We hope to create a cluster within which faculty and students can move around, share ideas, do research and take courses,” Adelman said.

University faculty can apply for funding by submitting a project proposal to a joint governance committee made up of administrators and faculty from both institutions. According to a call for proposals sent out to faculty Thursday, projects will be selected based on innovation of ideas, expertise of participating scholars and cost-effectiveness of the budget, along with numerous other criteria. The maximum support that will be offered for large grant proposals is $300,000. Adelman said the universities will each contribute half of the funds.

Like the other two partnerships, formal ties with Humboldt University build upon a longstanding academic relationship between the two schools.

“The good thing about the Princeton partnership is that it’s really a bottom-up initiative,” Humboldt International Strategy Officer Claudia Schmidt-Memmler said. “Even before we signed the memorandum and before the whole strategic partnership came into being there was substantial collaboration between people at Humboldt and Princeton.”

Schmidt-Memmler said the partnership is expected to enhance preexisting programs between the two universities and encourage more collaboration in the future.

“It just makes sense for our two institutions to cooperate because we’re so similar in what we do and often in our approach to international activities.”

Strong ties with Humboldt already exist within the University’s German department. Humboldt professor of German literature, cultural and media studies Joseph Vogl has been a permanent visiting professor at Princeton since 2007. Vogl is also co-vice director of the Princeton Kafka Network, an international research initiative funded by the Global Collaborative Research Fund. The network was approved in 2009 to encourage cooperation with scholars from Humboldt and the University of Oxford in the study of Franz Kafka’s intellectual life and work.

In addition, Humboldt philosophy professor Dominik Perler was awarded a Global Scholar teaching appointment at the University in September by the Council for International Teaching and Research. Perler is one of four professors to receive this honor for the 2012-13 academic year.

In May, the University also launched a dual Ph.D. program with Humboldt University that allows credentialed participants to earn Ph.D. degrees in the humanities from both institutions.

According to Dean for Research and physics professor A.J. Stewart Smith, the University also has strong ties with Humboldt in areas of chemical engineering, chemistry, polymer science and organic electronics.

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Smith said the choice to collaborate with Humboldt University was largely motivated by its recent appointment as a top-level research university by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, or DFG, Germany’s largest research funding organization. In 2012, one of Humboldt’s graduate schools, the School of Analytical Sciences Adlershof, was awarded a grant through the DFG’s Excellence Initiative to enhance the quality of German higher education.

“They have risen through the ranks to the very top,” Smith said.

The Adlershof campus, located approximately 10 miles southeast of the main university building, houses departmental offices and research facilities in the sciences and engineering, with the exception of biology. The graduate school currently comprises 15,000 people and is expected to double in size over the next 10 years. According to Smith, Adlershof offers exceptional opportunities to students due to its unique location in the center of several major industrial corporations’ research buildings.

Adelman noted that the University decided to partner with Humboldt in part because it offers programs for undergraduate and graduate students, in addition to joint faculty research.

“If any one of those constituencies is missing from the equation, it’s not a strong candidate for a strategic partnership,” Adelman said.

The University does not have any specific plans to establish partnerships with other European institutions, Adelman said. However, Adelman and his colleagues will be traveling to England in May to discuss the future of the University’s preexisting partnership with the University of Oxford. Princeton’s relationship with Oxford is not currently an officially designated strategic partnership.

“Now that we have this new model with Tokyo and Brazil and with Berlin, we might want to think about reinventing the Oxford model to look like these others,” Adelman said.

According to Schmidt-Memmler, Humboldt does not have strategic partnerships with any other international institutions at this time. Though the school is working to establish similar relationships with other universities in the future, Schmidt-Memmler declined to share details about those programs until all plans have been finalized.