The team for the Berlin University Alliance (BUA) Grand Challenge Initiatives is complete. Nehle Frerick and Jeanette Schlief complement the Focusing on Grand Challenges objective with the Head of Office Dr. Claudia Wiedner and the Scientific Coordinator Social Cohesion, Christian Richter.

Nehle Frerick took over the Grand Challenge Initiative on Global Health objective area as a program manager on August 15. Prior to that, she worked for five years as a consultant at the GFA Consulting Group in Hamburg. As part of this role, she has acquired and coordinated international health projects in the areas Pandemic Prevention, Digital Health, and One Health. Among other things, she was project coordinator of two regional pandemic prevention projects in West Africa. In addition, Nehle Frerick has advised the African Union on the development of a digital health strategy. From 2015 to 2016, she worked as a consultant in health financing at UNAIDS in Bangkok. Nehle Frerick completed a master's degree in International Health at Charité. "I am now looking forward to advancing the topic of global health within the Berlin excellence alliance and to creating a network with the partner institutions that is sustainably anchored in the Berlin research environment."

Dr. Jeanette Schlief joined the BUA on May 1, 2022, as a Next Grand Challenge program manager. Born in Berlin, she has many years of experience working at the interface between science, politics, and society. She is familiar with the complexity of Grand Challenges research, having previously conducted her own research on the impacts of global change on aquatic ecosystems as a doctoral ecologist. For more than ten years, she has been working as a science manager in various national and international alliance projects, creating conditions that enable scientists to conduct interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research in order to develop strategies for solving the global challenges of our time. Most recently, she was part of a multinational team at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Halle and Leipzig designed to set up a European infrastructure for long-term ecosystem research (eLTER RI).

The excellence alliance understands Grand Challenges as complex challenges that involve a broad spectrum of interrelated phenomena from different areas of society and impact a wide variety of disciplines and stakeholders. The first two Grand Challenge Initiatives are dedicated to the topics of social cohesion and global health. The subject of the next Grand Challenge Initiative – the "Next Grand Challenge" – will be jointly identified in a transdisciplinary and participatory process involving the participation of science, politics, economy, and society.