The Northwest Alliance supports researchers at all career phases, particularly doctoral and postdoctoral researchers, through close cooperation between the two central qualification facilities in Bremen and Oldenburg. By fostering interdisciplinary networking and cross-location cooperation, the alliance strengthens career development and promotes a supportive academic environment across institutions.
Joint Structures, Connected Offers
With BYRD – Bremen Early Career Researcher Development at the University of Bremen and the Graduate Academy of the University of Oldenburg, both universities have well-established institutions for academic qualification and career development that work closely together within the Northwest Alliance. The institutions accompany academic careers from the doctoral phase to post-doctoral orientation. By providing counseling and networking opportunities, they support the development of strong academic profiles and interdisciplinary skills, enabling researchers to pursue a variety of academic and non-academic career paths.
Researchers can take advantage of
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mutually beneficial qualification programs
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joint event series, e.g. for doctoral supervision
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coordinated networking and exchange formats
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coordinated support across university and subject boundaries
Joint DFG Research Training Groups
In the HEARAZ Research Training Group at the universities of Oldenburg and Bremen, young researchers are developing connected hearing assistance systems (hearables) and integrating them into everyday life and care practice. By linking hearing aids with sensors and external devices, personalized health centers are created on the ear that go beyond hearing improvement to also support perception, communication, mobility, and social participation. The training combines basic research, application research, and care research with clinical, technical, and ethical-social perspectives and is supplemented by practical work shadowing, lab rotations, and innovative simulation methods.
The CAUSE Research Training Group at the universities of Bremen and Oldenburg as well as the Hamburg University of Technology addresses the challenges of digitally controlled, complex systems for which the interfaces and interactions are often poorly understood. The aim is to make such systems self-explanatory by developing technical, logical, and algorithmic foundations for understandable explanations and integrating them into the systems engineering process.
With an interdisciplinary consortium, a comprehensive demonstrator, and a research-oriented doctorate, CAUSE combines theory, methodology, and practical application.
Whether it is online shopping, job platforms, or financial apps – IT systems often influence economic decisions. The Karlsruhe Decision and Design School (KD²School) investigates how economic decisions are supported by IT-based systems and how these systems need to be designed. The aim of the KD²School is to develop rigid decision-making systems into dynamic systems that adapt to the respective decision-making context. This context includes personal factors such as stress, task-related aspects such as complexity, and environmental factors such as incentives. On this basis, economic institutions and their IT implementation are to be designed in such a way that they effectively support people and continuously improve. Researchers from the fields of information systems and management, economics, psychology, and computer science at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), the University of Bremen, and the University of Oldenburg work together in the research group.