On Monday, 4 November 2024, the third Straubing Sustainability Talks will take place at the TUM Campus Straubing (TUMCS) – a joint format of Hochschulstadt Straubing e.V. and the TUM Campus. This time, the colloquium will focus on water. With the event, in which the Bavarian Minister of the Environment, Thorsten Glauber (Free Voters), will also take part, the organisers want to highlight the dangers to which the elixir of life, water, is exposed and how this valuable resource can be sustainably protected.

Every year, people throw away about a third of the food produced worldwide – a fact that has serious ecological, economic and social consequences. Food waste contributes significantly to climate change. At the same time, one billion people worldwide suffer from malnutrition. In this context, reducing food waste is a central step towards a more sustainable and fairer world. In line with the Global Food Waste Challenge Week, leading scientists from the US, Asia and Europe, along with representatives from the retail sector, have now developed strategies to reduce food waste at the TUM Campus Straubing (TUMCS).

The European Research Council supports nine further ERC grants to support projects by researchers at the Technical University of Munich (TUM). Two of the funded projects move to the TUM Campus Straubing this year.

Climate change and the destruction of the environment pose an existential threat to the world. With its Climate Protection Act and the National Climate Protection Initiative, the German government wants to conserve resources and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The ambitious goal is to make Germany climate-neutral by 2045. However, in order to achieve this ambitious goal, the public needs to support this climate policy. A recent study by economists from the Straubing Campus for Biotechnology and Sustainability at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) shows that the perceived support for climate policy in Germany is generally underestimated.

Prof. Rubén D. Costa is honored to be supported by the European Research Council (ERC) to realize the Proof of Concept (PoC) project CERES – Crop Efficient Red Emitting Sources. This generous funding will allow Prof. Costas Chair of Biogenic Functional Materials to explore new avenues of our multidisciplinary research portfolio supported by ERC-Co InOutBioLight.

The two researchers Prof. Clemens Thielen from the Professorship of Complex Networks at HSWT on the TUM Campus Straubing (TUMCS) and Dr. Jan Boeckmann were awarded the EURO Prize for OR for the Common Good 2024 by the Association of European Operational Research Societies (EURO) at the beginning of July for the research article resulting from their project on heavy rainfall prevention.

Ken Albrecht, Andrew Monkman and I – U. Kyushu, U. Durham, and TUM Campus Straubing –have organized an international workshop on unconventional emitters and device mechanism covering TADF, chiral, protein and radical emitters applied to lighting, lasers, and photovoltaic surrounded by fresh spectroscopic, machine learning, and theoretical methodologies

On June 11th, 2024 the European Innovation Council and Small and Medium Enterprises Agency (EISMEA) funded project ECOMO (https://www.ecomo-eic.eu) organized a symposium titled “Carbon and Nitrogen Valorization: Sustainability in Focus”. The symposium was hosted by Dr. Hemlata Agarwala and Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Nicolas Plumeré from the Professorship of Electrobiotechnology (EBT).

Several TUMCS professorships are involved in “LifeSenMap”. BR accompanied the researchers and produced a report that can be viewed in the media library.