The Core of the Institutional Strategy - The Integrative Research Institutes (IRI)
The new Integrative Research Institutes (IRI) are designed to provide an excellent research environment in which researchers have sufficient time to concentrate on research themes of great topicality in a fruitful exchange with outstanding researchers from abroad, thus enriching teaching and research at Humboldt-Universität and in the entire research community in Berlin.
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin intends to establish up to four Integrative Research Institutes which are to be developed preferably in academic subjects where the standards are particularly high, where the profile of the University is shaped and where by interdisciplinary work researchers find solutions to problems which cannot be achieved by the individual disciplines.
Life sciences are one of these topical subjects. Therefore, the "Institute of Integrative Life Sciences" (IILS) headed by Prof. Dr. Karl Max Einhäupl, is inaugurated at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and at the Charité as the first Integrative Research Institute on the basis of excellent resources in the life sciences.
The integration of so-called “hard life sciences” with research findings in the arts, humanities and social sciences is characteristic of the new concept on which the Institute is based: Only where biologists and medical experts, psychologists, soiologists and economists, neuro-scientists and philosophers collaborate in one place, complex themes, e.g. the foundations of decision making can adequately be investigated.
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin wants to be the place where life science research is raised to a even higher level by means of this concept. And it is for this reason that a new building is being set up for the “Institute for Integrative Life Sciences” on the University’s northern campus in the centre of Berlin.