Seventeen bachelor’s and master’s students from disciplines as diverse as biophysics, psychology, sports science, as well as the social sciences, cultural studies, and history will meet regularly over the course of one year. In groups of 2 to 3, the scholarship recipients will do research on a so-called base project.
Situated at the disciplinary intersection of the cultural and natural sciences, the project Analog Storage Media investigates analogous memory processes to gain knowledge that might become productive for future storage technologies. Among other things, “historical” storage media such as records are tested experimentally using state-of-the-art technologies and knowledge.
The second base project, Image Guidance, is a medical, image-critical research project exploring those visualization practices that serve as an interface between medical professionals and patients and thus intervene into the clinical-therapeutic process in a guideline function.
The Anthropocene Kitchen explores the idea that human activity changes the planet on a global scale – as a result not of individual decisions and actions, but of the accumulation of a huge number of individual and collective decisions. The base project connects this topic with a key issue of human activity: food and alimentation.
Finally, Experiment & Observation deals with laboratories as places where new knowledge is created through experiments. But where does the knowledge of what a lab is and how it should be designed come from? To answer these questions, the interdisciplinary lab “Image Knowledge Gestaltung” will be subject to scrutiny in a virtual laboratory of scientific research.
The theme course is affiliated with “Image Knowledge Gestaltung: An Interdisciplinary Laboratory,” a Cluster of Excellence of the same name at Berlin’s Humboldt University.

The theme courses aim to provide Germany Scholarship recipients with insight into current research projects at an early stage in their studies, in order to enable them to develop and present their own ideas. Conversely, the participating scientists hope that the scholarship recipients’ thirst for knowledge and fresh views will stimulate and inspire them to critically interrogate scientific theories, including their own, and develop new perspectives.

In selecting the participants for its theme course, the Schering Stiftung, true to its program focus, paid particular attention to the fact that the students were interested in the arts or the sciences beyond their own discipline.