Welcome to the Medical Faculty of the University of Bonn

October 2nd, 2025@DZNE Lecture Hall, Venusberg

The Bonn Cluster of Excellence ImmunoSensation3 will be funded for further seven years as part of the Excellence Strategy of the German federal and state governments. The aim of the new funding period, which begins on January 1, 2026, is to research immune diversity: the structural, functional and dynamic diversity of the immune system. Involved are the University of Bonn, the University Hospital Bonn (UKB) and the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE). The funding amounts to around 50 million euros.

A huge success for the University of Bonn: today, all six of the University of Bonn's existing Clusters of Excellence were selected for further funding in the nationwide Excellence Competition. In addition, both newly applied Bonn cluster initiatives will receive funding from the federal and state governments. This means that Bonn will be represented by a total of eight clusters in the coming funding period - more than at any other university in Germany.

Although manual small incision cataract surgery (SICS) is widely practiced in countries of the global South, there is no publicly available surgical video dataset for this operation, leaving a critical gap in cataract surgery research. Therefore, an international research team at Sankara Eye Foundation India led by the University Hospital Bonn (UKB) and the University of Bonn has developed the first automated phase detection using AI in SICS. The results of the study have now been published in the renowned journal "Scientific Reports". In parallel, the international research team is now launching a global AI competition at the MICCAI 2025 conference in Daejeon (South Korea), in which AI algorithms for surgical phase detection will compete against each other. The submission deadline is 15th of August 2025.