Nine scientists from the Center for Advanced Systems Understanding (CASUS) – an institute of the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) – discussed their research work and life in Görlitz with Michael Kretschmer last Friday. In doing so, they accepted the invitation of the Saxon Minister-President to jointly bake a Stollen.
Michael Kretschmer last visited CASUS around six months ago. At that time, the focus was on welcoming the CASUS Founding Director, Prof. Thomas D. Kühne. Kretschmer also spoke to a number of researchers during a small gathering. Even then, the Minister-President announced that he would like to continue with these informal talks.
At the end of November, the time had come: Kretschmer invited the CASUS team to join him in baking Stollen at a bakery in Görlitz. Most of the four women and six men from the scientific team are not originally from Saxony, three come from different parts of Germany, four have roots abroad: Kazakhstan, Poland, Portugal and Turkey. Baking together was therefore not just about the Stollen, the Saxon Christmas cake par excellence. Rather, the many different national and international (Christmas) traditions were presented.
The CASUS delegation, led by Thomas D. Kühne, reported on its latest research successes and the completed move into a second office unit in Görlitz. However, the institute is still in its growth phase. The need for one single sufficiently large research building for CASUS was therefore also a topic of discussion between kneading dough and buttering as well as sugaring Stollen.
About the Center for Advanced Systems Understanding
CASUS was founded 2019 in Görlitz/Germany and pursues data-intensive interdisciplinary systems research in such diverse disciplines as earth systems research, systems biology or materials research. The goal of CASUS is to create digital images of complex systems of unprecedented fidelity to reality with innovative methods from mathematics, theoretical systems research, simulations as well as data and computer science to give answers to urgent societal questions. The founding partners of CASUS are the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR), the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Leipzig (UFZ), the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden (MPI-CBG), the Technical University of Dresden (TUD) and the University of Wrocław (UWr). CASUS, managed as an institute of the HZDR, is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the Saxon State Ministry for Science, Culture and Tourism (SMWK).