University of Cologne

The University of Cologne has six Faculties covering a broad spectrum of disciplines and has developed internationally outstanding research profile areas on this basis.

The life and natural sciences are represented by the Faculty of Medicine and the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences comprising biology, chemistry, geography, geosciences, mathematics and physics. These two Faculties have greatly benefited from long-standing excellent collaborations. Cutting-edge, internationally competitive research is currently being performed in many fields including research on aging-associated diseases, molecular evolutionary biology and plant sciences, quaternary research, and statistical physics. In addition, three interdisciplinary centres, the Center of Molecular Medicine Cologne, the Cologne Center for Genomics and the Center for Integrated Oncology directly link basic with translational research.

The Faculty of Arts and Humanities builds on a comprehensive and broad range of disciplines and has developed successful research foci in many areas, e.g. pre-modern cultures, medieval studies, literary studies and non-European cultures and languages in general and Africa research and cross-linguistic research in particular. In addition, a number of the Faculty’s research institutions are internationally recognized for their high levels of academic achievement, e.g. the Thomas Institute, the Husserl Archive, and the Cologne Digital Archaeology Laboratory.

The Faculty of Management, Economics and Social Sciences and the Faculty of Law both enjoy an excellent reputation in application-oriented research and are regarded as top German institutions in their fields. These two Faculties have strong links to around 30 affiliated institutes including public-private partnerships, e.g. the Institute for Energy Economics and the Center for Financial Research Cologne. Recently, fundamental research has been strengthened in the key areas of quantitative and experimental economic research and international law.

The Faculty of Human Sciences was founded in 2007 and has already established successful research foci in, e.g., intercultural education and social psychology. In addition, its department of special education and rehabilitation is one of the largest centres in Europe. The Faculty aims to further develop educational research as one of its key research foci.