Since its foundation in November 2019, TU President Professor Tanja Brühl has served as President of the European university alliance Unite!. Initially elected by the Governing Platform for the three-year pilot phase, Brühl was confirmed in office for a further three years on 22 November 2022. This is because in July of this year, the European Commission approved funding of 14.4 million euros for the implementation of the second funding phase of Unite! until 2026, which serves to sustainably anchor Unite! at the partner universities.
Since the end of 2022, Professor Thomas Walther has been Vice-President for Innovation and International Affairs at TU Darmstadt. He represents TU Darmstadt as a partner university within Unite! and as coordinator for political and strategic matters.
After six years of dedicated leadership, Tanja Brühl handed over the Unite! Presidency to Vivien Quéma from Grenoble INP-UGA. The official handover took place in October 2025 during the Unite! Dialogues at Aalto University in Espoo, Finland. Quéma was unanimously elected by the Unite! Assembly. Together with the elected Vice Presidents Anders Söderholm from KTH and Arkadiusz Wojs from Wrocław University, she has set clear priorities: strengthening governance structures and defining strategic focus areas for the coming years. Unite! is currently applying for bridging funding from the end of 2026 until 2028, already with a view to the next EU framework programme for 2028–2034.
The Unite! Secretariat, based at TU Darmstadt and headed by Secretary General Dr Andreas Winkler and Unite! Deputy Secretary General Dr Anshika Suri continues to coordinate and manage the alliance of the nine partner universities. It is responsible for the overall management of Unite! and is located within Department VIII D International Relations – Europe & Unite!.
The Unite! activities within each Unite! university are coordinated by the respective Unite! leads, the so-called Unite! Key Liaison Officers. Dr Jana Freihöfer, Head of the Department VIII – International Affairs, serves as Unite! Key Liaison Officer at TU Darmstadt. She is supported by the Deputy Unite! Key Liaison Officer, Dr PD Nebojša Čamprag.
Unite! will become tangible for the various status groups at TU Darmstadt in projects, initiatives, various offers and in the development of strategic projects such as research cooperations or joint programmes. All members of TU Darmstadt should contribute to how TU Darmstadt directly influences Unite! and how Unite! impacts TU Darmstadt. The aim is for Unite! to develop out of the universities – with all of their status groups – and the structure is merely designed to facilitate this process. Contact persons for ideas are the Key Liaison Officers.
The European Universities Initiative
The European Commission proposed the European Universities Initiative in 2019 to shape and drive the creation of a European Education Area by 2025. The European Universities are transnational alliances of higher education institutions from across the EU that share a long-term strategy and promote European values and identity. The initiative is designed to significantly strengthen student and staff mobility and foster the quality, equity and competitiveness of European higher education.
Responding to a call in 2019 under the Erasmus+ Framework Programme, the first 17 Alliances were selected for a pilot phase of 3 years to build the foundations of the future European Universities. This was followed by 24 more alliances in the second call in 2020 and additional funding from the EU under the Horizon 2020 call “Science with and for Society” to strengthen the Research and Innovation activities of European universities towards a European Research Area.
The current Unite! funding, which started at the end of 2022, falls under the calls for further implementation of the European Higher Education Initiative. The aim is to increase the number of European universities to 60 by mid-2024, bringing together more than 500 universities and supported by Erasmus+ with an expected budget of €1.1 billion for the period 2021-2027. The aim is to develop and share joint and long-term structural, sustainable and systemic cooperation in education, research and innovation to create European inter-university campuses where students, staff and researchers from all parts of Europe can enjoy seamless mobility and create new knowledge together across countries and disciplines.
