Bioeconomy Science Center

Global Challenges

On a global scale, people are in search of innovative and sustainable solutions to overcome the long term challenges of food security, climate protection and management of natural resources as well as provision of energy supplies.
A promising approach is the generation and integration of knowledge about biological systems for the sustainable production of bio-based raw materials and their usage as food and feed and transformation into bio-based materials, chemicals and energy.

Global Competence
The BioSC is an innovative competence center where the scientific expertise and modern infrastructure within important bioeconomy topics of the universities Bonn, Düsseldorf and RWTH Aachen as well as the Research Center Jülich are clustered. The BioSC partners have developed a long term strategy to generate synergies in bioeconomy research and education.

The BioSC integrates key research disciplines for the provision of biomass and bio-based products and processes in different value chains. Based on the expertise of the partners the BioSC focuses on four research areas and their integration:

Sustainable plant production and resource stewardship
Microbial and molecular transformation
Chemical engineering and processing of renewable resources
Economic and social implications

Three cross-cutting topics are relevant for several research areas and and provide a link between them:

Systems engineering
Structural biology
Bioinformatics and knowledge management

To find solutions for the urging societal challenges, BioSC nterdisciplinary expert groups are looking for integrative solution approaches. According to the scientific question, specific project teams from the BioSC expertise portfolio form to work jointly on sustainable solutions. The BioSC expertise includes amongst others:
(Bio-)Chemistry, Molecular Biology, Crop Funuctional Genomics, Crop and Horticulture Sciences, Soil Sciences, Ecosystem Analysis, Environmental Biology, Biotechnology, Bioinformatics, Biochemical Engineering, Enzyme Process Technology, Resource and Environmental Economics, Agricultural Policy, Development Research.

Cooperation structure and size of the BioSC provide unique prerequisites for the inter- and transdisciplinary cross-linking by the integration of fundamental and applied bioeconomy research.

Education
Development and implementation of a sustainable bio-based economy are based on the education of young people. In all fields of the knowledge-based bioeconomy experts are required urgently today. Therefore, the BioSC aims for a transdisciplinary education of graduates at an international top level. The transfer of excellent basic knowledge and the holistic understanding of bioeconomy challenges are in the focus of the BioSC graduate education.
The BioSC graduate education program “Sustainable bioeconomy” provides a wide range of relevant modules and an additional certificate for people on all steps of career development.

Summer schools
Methods workshops
Youg researcher awards
Lecture series
Lab exchanges
Excursions
Seminars