Focus Groups
The criteria for Fellow selection are the quality of the researcher and the attractiveness of his or her research project. The Wissenschaftskolleg appoints Fellows from all fields and disciplines. Every year these include researchers from the humanities, the social sciences, and the life sciences, along with individual artists in the fields of music, visual art, and/or literature.
Each year there are two or three focus groups. Especially in the natural sciences and with younger researchers, it has proven useful to jointly invite small groups of three to five Fellows whose individual research plans relate to each other from the beginning. To preserve enough flexibility to accommodate the unexpected, the Wissenschaftskolleg has made it a rule that less than half of a year's Fellows are invited within the framework of focus groups.
2018/2019
Jacobus J. (Koos) Boomsma
2017/2018
Carola Lentz
2016/2017
Peter M. Kappeler, Tamás Székely
2015/2016
Tim Caro
Victoria A. Braithwaite
Tatiana Borisova, Jane Burbank
2014/2015
Steven A. Frank
Guntram Hazod
2013/2014
Michael Hochberg
Gerald S. Wilkinson
Wendy Espeland
2012/2013
Atac Imamoglu, K. Birgitta Whaley
2010/2011
Janis Antonovics
Steven Feierman, Julie Livingston
2009/2010
Classical Simulation of Quantum Systems: Classical Information vs. Quantum Information
Ulrich Schollwöck
Complexity and Flexibility in Animal Communication
Vincent M. Janik, Klaus Zuberbühler
Functional and Structural Constraints in the Evolution of Sensorimotor Networks
Harald Wolf
Social Insects as a Model System for Evolutionary Developmental Biology
Manfred D. Laubichler, Robert E. Page, Jr.
2008/2009
Auditory and Visual Scene Analysis
Cynthia F. Moss
Sympatric Speciation: Theoretical and Empirical Considerations
Axel Meyer
Understanding the Brain - An Attempt to Unify Language Production, Reasoning and Motor Control
Holk Cruse
2007/2008
Constitution Beyond the Nation State
Evolutionary Medicine
Randolph M. Nesse
2006/2007
Evolutionary Immunology
Joachim Kurtz, Paul Schmid-Hempel
ImageScience - Media and Politics
Phylogenetic Biology
Wayne Paul Maddison
Religious Transformation Processes in the Present
Friedrich Wilhelm Graf
2005/2006
Inner Model Theory
John Steel
Religion and Contingency
Hans Joas
2004/2005
Bildwissenschaft/ImageScience
Horst Bredekamp
Conflict Resolution in Biological Systems
Francis L. W. Ratnieks
Infectious Diseases Epidemiology
Hajo Grundmann
2003/2004
Cultural Mobility
Stephen J. Greenblatt
Development of Spatial Cognition
Islamic and Jewish Hermeneutics as Cultural Critique
Science and the Public
2002/2003
Brain Evolution
Georg Striedter
Nutrition
David Raubenheimer, Stephen J. Simpson
The Sciences of Risk
Alex Kacelnik
2001/2002
Neural Control and Locomotion
Ansgar Büschges
Social History of Muslim Societies - Social History of Western Societies
Beshara Doumani, David Warren Sabean
Social Norms and Economic Behaviour
Ernst Fehr
The Sciences of Risk
Alex Kacelnik
2000/2001
Demography and the Evolution of Eusociality
Raghavendra Gadagkar
South Asian Historiography
David Shulman
Spatial Cognition
Hans-Ulrich Schnitzler
1999/2000
AGORA Work - Knowledge Cohesion
Neurolinguistics
Angela Friederici
1998/1999
Biomimetics
Daniel Robert
Cultural Foundations of Economic Reality
Hansjörg Siegenthaler
The Meaning of Time in Quantum Theory
John Stuart Briggs
1997/1998
Parallel Processing and the Binding Problem
Andreas K. Engel, Rainer Goebel
Visual Ecology and Evolution
Eric J. Warrant
1996/1997
Active Vision
Mandyam V. Srinivasan
Sex and Evolutionary Conflicts
Andrew Pomiankowski
1995/1996
Evolution of Global Biogeochemical Cycles and Environmental Change
Kenneth J. Hsü
Models as mediators: The Role of Models in Physics and Economics
Brigitte Falkenburg
Spatio-Temporal Processes in Ecolocial Communities
Andreas Diekmann, Richard Law
1993/1994
Biodiversity
Richard I. Vane-Wright
Collective Intelligence: Self-Organizing Superorganism Systems
Scott Camazine
1992/1993
Physics of Disordered Systems
Hans A. Weidenmüller