Dr. Ulrike Endesfelder elected as member of the Junge Akademie
At the annual celebration on 6 June 2015, the Junge Akademie welcomed ten new members into its midst, among them Dr. Ulrike Endesfelder, Project Group Leader at the Department of Systems and Synthetic Microbiology since October 2014.
The Junge Akademie is the first academy of young academics worldwide. It provides interdisciplinary and socially relevant spaces for outstanding young academics from German-speaking countries.
The Junge Akademie was founded in 2000 as a joint project of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. Since then, it has become a role model and example for similar initiatives in many other countries.
Founded based on the conviction that in this part of the world, young academics have little opportunity to develop freely or shape the academic system, the Junge Akademie has set itself two overriding tasks:
- encouraging academic, especially interdisciplinary, discourse among outstanding young academics
- promoting initiatives at the intersection of academia and society.
To that end, every member, elected for five years, is endowed with research budget for joint academic projects. Overall, the Junge Akademie counts 50 members. Each year, ten of its members retire from active membership and assume the status of alumni, while ten new members are admitted into the Academy. The Junge Akademie is free to choose its form of work. Members meet regularly in different Research Groups and thrice-yearly in the Plenums to exchange information on their current research projects and agree upon joint projects and publications.
