Freie Universität (FU Berlin) — founded in 1948 – is a full university with 16 departments and central institutes offering over 170 degree programmes across a wide range of subjects. The FU Berlin currently has roundabout 31,500 students and 4,400 PhD students. The FU Berlin is one of the few German universities which were successful in all three funding lines in the German federal and state Excellence Initiative, thereby receiving additional funding for its institutional future development strategy. The Dahlem Research School (DRS) at FU Berlin provides research training and professional development opportunities to its researchers at every stage of their graduate careers. It offers a wide range of key transferable skills during the doctoral study phase. Furthermore, an international outlook defines the research activities and academic life at FU Berlin: It currently maintains more than 100 international partnerships, along with 330 university partnerships within the Erasmus academic exchange network and 45 institute partnerships. More than 6,500 scientists from 130 different countries are currently involved in undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral studies and in teaching activities at FU Berlin. The FU Berlin has a professional Research Funding Support Service that has long-standing experience in administrating small and large-scale grants, among them various EU projects.
The FU Berlin hosts the sequencing consortium: Berlin Center for Genomics in Biodiversity Research (BeGenDiv). DM has established collaborations within BeGenDiv and also BioSupraMol, a centralised FU-platform for mass-spectrometry, NMR, microfluidics and microscopy and has access via the Bundesanstalt für Materialforschung und -prüfung (www.bam.de) to a large-scale field testing facility (Testgelände Technische Sicherheit – TTS) as well as the beamline in the tomographic imaging facility at the BESSY-2 synchrotron. Laboratories are well-resourced microbiology labs for virology and bacteriology research, with S1 facilities throughout and S2 status in four laboratories with multiple clean benches and fume hoods. The division is well established for advanced whole-insect and molecular biology with multiple controlled temperature climate chambers, insect flight rooms, and incubators. DM has unrestricted access to the new high performance Curta cluster at the FU Berlin.