On 27 September 2018, members of the international Committee of Experts and the research ministers of Germany’s federal and state governments selected the Clusters to be funded in Germany’s Excellence Strategy. RESOLV is among the 57 awarded clusters in Germany. The Cluster will therefore perform new research in solvation science starting from 2019 and for the following seven years. The RESOLV team defended its proposal in June in Berlin, the DFG committee had to decide among 88 candidates.
RESOLV was first funded as Cluster of Excellence in 2012, aiming to understand the role of solvents, like water for example, at the molecular detail in the most diverse chemical processes.
"We are delighted to be funded again and to be able to tackle the future challenges of solvation science", says Prof. Dr. Martina Havenith, speaker of RESOLV. "We will now explore chemical processes beyond ambient conditions, beyond thermal equilibrium and beyond homogeneous bulk phase to advance the development of important technological applications, such as energy conversion and storage, or the development of smart sensors."
The new RESOLV will be hosted by the RUB and the TU Dortmund University and will comprise also research groups from the University of Duisburg Essen, the Fraunhofer Institute for Environmental, Safety, and Energy Technology UMSICHT (based in Oberhausen), the Max Plank Institutes for Coal and Iron Research (in Düsseldorf and Mülheim an der Ruhr, respectively).