Matthias Driess elected as a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities

Thursday, 13 March 2014
Prof. Matthias Driess, Chair of the Cluster of Excellence UniCat

Matthias Driess

Professor Dr. Matthias Driess, Chair of UniCat, has been elected as a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities by its council appreciating his scientific achievements.

The Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities is a learned society with a three-hundred-year-old tradition of uniting outstanding scholars and scientists across national and disciplinary boundaries. 78 Nobel prizewinners have shaped its history. As the largest non-university research institute for the humanities in the Berlin-Brandenburg region, it preserves and reveals the region’s cultural inheritance, while also pursuing research and offering advice on issues that are crucial for the future of society and providing a forum for dialogue between scholarship and public.

The Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, which has had many names since its inception, looks back on an eventful past. Reconstituted in its present form in 1992 by an interstate agreement between Berlin and Brandenburg, it carries on the tradition of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. It was founded in 1700 by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646 – 1716). From the start, this institution united the natural sciences and the humanities, which made it the prototype for many academies that followed.