From 12 till 14 November 2025 a new cycle of the Academic Leadership programme for senior university managers will be launched in Groningen with an opening session on 'Developing Academic Talent.

The U4 Academic Leadership programme is a programme for top-level executives in university management in one of our four co-operative (U4) universities.

The programme allows university leaders (both from academia and administration) to strengthen their skills in leadership and to learn more about university management in today’s increasingly international, complex and competitive environment.

On 23 and 24 November the University of Goettingen hosts the VIIth annual U4 rectors' meeting.

During the annual sumposium the rectors decide on the strategy and agenda of the upcoming U4 year together with a delegation of university directors, cluster coordinators and students of the respective partner universities.

The setting of this two-days meeting is the historical Paulinerkirche which at present is the convention and exposition centre for the State and University Library of Goettingen.

Yanli Wu is currently pursuing her PhD studies at the University of Groningen and the Georg-August University Göttingen. She received her B.S in Biotechnology from Northwest University in 2010 and her M.S in Cellular Biology from Xiamen University, both China, in 2013.

Her current research aims at characterizing the elusive male determining (M) factor of the housefly, under the supervision of Prof. Leo W. Beukeboom from the Department of Evolutionary Genetics in Groningen and Prof. Ernst A. Wimmer from the Department of Developmental Biology in Göttingen.

This year’s U4 Summer School “Ageing Brain” was hosted by the University of Göttingen from 31 August till 5 September.

Within the U4 Research Network “Ageing Brain”, the Universities of Ghent, Göttingen, Groningen and Uppsala bundle research activities focusing on changes in the ageing brain with a special emphasis on neurodegenerative processes.

This year’s "Hadron Collider Physics Summer School – HASCO 2014", was attended by 83 students and 23 lecturers from nine different countries including participants from the U4 Network, namely Ghent, Göttingen and Uppsala.

Besides the principles of Quantum field theory and the hadron collider physics, this year’s focus was the physics of the higgsboson.

Prof. Arnulf Quadt, the organizer of the Summer School, emphasizes how important it is for young students to experience at an early stage of their career the creative and productive atmosphere of working in an international team.

On Monday 17 November, a one-day event on the topic of Smart Cities will be held at the University of Groningen for PhDs, postdocs and researchers from the U4 partners.

The meeting is a side event of the Energy Convention 2014, to be held on 18 and 19 November (Martiniplaza). The Energy Convention brings together 1000 participants from research, business and government. This year, the main topics of the conference are Smart Cities and Innovation.

Advances in reproductive medicine, like in-vitro fertilization and germ cell donation, have a high potential to change dramatically our perception of family and parenthood.

Recent research in reproductive medicine focuses on infertility due to advanced age. Within the last ten years, it has become possible to store oocytes by cryopreservation. Due to this improvement in egg-cell vitrification, the option for healthy women to freeze their unfertilized egg cells, so-called ‘social freezing’, is now likely to become clinical routine.

We will discuss this new technology, compare different legal and ethical approaches on an international level and discuss the normative concepts of late parenthood in light of a family-ethics approach.

From 13 till 16 May about 35 students from all U4 partners took part in the 3rd U4 Student Network meeting. For the first time all partner universities could sent a full student delegation.

The aim of the workshop is to give PhD students and young researchers a state-of-the-art overview of business management methods key to ensuring sustainability and resource efficiency.

The workshop will provide comprehensive insights from various disciplines (quantitative methods of operational research, operation management, managerial environmental information systems, and marketing) addressing interdisciplinary research questions.

The main focus of the workshop is to give students the chance to exchange ideas and research possibilities.