Welcome to the Einstein Center of Catalysis / BIG-NSE!

Participants of the BIG-NSE retreat 2019

The BIG-NSE is an international Graduate School founded on May 29 2007 at the Technische Universitaet Berlin (TUB). Between 2007 and 2018, the School has been part of the Cluster "Unified Concepts in Catalysis" (UniCat: see www.unicat.tu-berlin.de) founded in 2007 by the TUB and five other Institutions in the Berlin area within the framework of the "Excellence Initiative" of the German Government. UniCat has been running succesfully during all this time and in September 2018, the Excellence Initiative decided to finance its follow-up Cluster of Excellence "UniSysCat" (see www.unisyscat.de) for another 7 years at least.

Since January 2019, the BIG-NSE has been part of the "Einstein Center of Catalysis" (EC²) supported by the Einstein Foundation Berlin. The concept of EC², which is closely linked to the UniSysCat research cluster, aims to inspire, initiate, and promote novel collaborations between research networks and institutions in Berlin on cutting-edge projects in chemistry and the molecular life sciences that may, in turn, open new directions for future catalysis research. For this purpose, in the coming years EC2/BIG-NSE will recruit excellent PhD students from all over the world, whose task will be to work on highly interdisciplinary research projects, overcoming the frontiers of classical disciplines in catalysis (soon more details about these projects about the recruitment procedure).