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Enno Aufderheide, Secretary General of the Humboldt Foundation honors the outgoing President: “In the New Year, the Foundation will face a turning point: Our President, Professor Hans-Christian Pape, will come to the end of his term of office. During his tenure as President of the Foundation, changes were launched, which he encouraged; they have helped to make us ‘future proof’.
Path-breaking programmes, such as the Henriette Herz Scouting Programme, the Alexander von Humboldt Professorship for Artificial Intelligence and the Humboldt Research Hubs in Africa were introduced. Apart from the current conflict in Ukraine, one of the biggest challenges of his tenure was certainly the Covid pandemic. I should like to take this opportunity to thank Professor Pape most warmly for his engagement in the last few years!”
President Pape looking back on his time at the Foundation: “The pandemic was certainly one of the major challenges of my period in office, but we managed to respond quickly, flexibly and unbureaucratically to help our sponsorship-recipients deal with lockdowns and travel restrictions. Much of what we learned during that period we now want to use in the future to facilitate new, more climate-friendly forms of academic mobility. The Sustainability Agenda that we have introduced together with a new strategy and a diversity agenda fall into this category. And the Foundation was able to provide humanitarian aid, too: the fellowships under the Philipp Schwartz Initiative allowed us to alleviate immediate needs, most recently with regard to the war in Ukraine. I am very proud of this. And, above all, I am very grateful.”
The President would also like to thank our friends and partners in politics and academia who have consistently supported the Foundation in the common struggle for the best solutions: “I trust and count on you to continue allowing the Foundations to benefit from your goodwill, your trust and your commitment even in difficult political and financial circumstances so that it may uphold the fine traditions and values whilst also carrying the flame of change into the future.”