In light of Germany’s Presidency of the Council of Europe, the University of Göttingen together with help from its partner universities, is organising the Conference 'United in Diversity: A Europe of Sustainability – Challenges and Perspectives' from 19 to 20 November 2020. We want to discuss the challenges of our society towards sustainable development and possible contributions of science to this as well as to show examples of the potential that sustainable dialogue and cooperation between different stakeholders can have.

One of the priorities of the European Commission is to fight the climate crisis and achieve climate neutrality in Europe by 2050. Research and innovation are to accelerate and navigate transformative changes, create solutions and engage citizens in the process. To this end, the Commission is allocating €1 billion under the last and biggest call of Horizon 2020: the Green Deal call is open and published on https://ec.europa.eu/info/research-and-innovation/strategy/european-green-deal/.

The ENLIGHT consortium of 9 European universities was selected in the framework of the second call for "European Universities", the European Commission's pilot program for new multilateral networks. ENLIGHT is one of 24 networks that can focus on an ambitious strategy on educational innovation and receives a start-up funding of 5 M €.

ENLIGHT fully stands for "European university Network to promote equitable quality of Life, sustainability and Global engagement through Higher education Transformation."

The 9 ENLIGHT universities have set as a common goal to fundamentally transform higher education and to empower students (and anyone who wants to learn) with the right knowledge and skills to become engaged professionals and respond to the major, complex societal challenges of the 21st century.

On Wednesday 1st July 2020 from 3:00 to 4:00 pm (CET) we have organized the public ENLIGHT lecture 'Literature, Narrative, and Covid-19'. The full video is published on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H36iWPFgqVs

Storytelling has formed an intrinsic part of the Covid-19 pandemic through journalism and other media, including social media exchanges. This session looked at forms of literary and narrative engagement with plague, disease and crisis from the 19th century to the present day. For this, Daniel Carey (National University of Ireland, Galway) was joined by Marysa Demoor, Ghent University (Belgium), Raili Marling (University of Tartu, Estonia) and Stephen Donovan (Uppsala University, Sweden) to discuss in Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year and The Storm, as well as the coverage of epidemics in 19th-century periodicals, and the representation of epidemics as looming but invisible crises in fiction.

On Wednesday 1st July 2020 from 6:00 to 7:00 pm (CET) we have organized the public ENLIGHT lecture 'SARS-CoV-2: New virus, new detection protocols'. The full video is published on https://youtu.be/FkEuuQzt8o4

With Tomas Szemes and Amanda Sierra, two renowned scientists from our partner institutions Comenius University Bratislava (Slovakia) and University of the Basque Country (Spain), we have shed light on the development of fast, secure and cheap SARS-CoV-2 detection protocols that allow the public health system the continuous screening of new infections in order to fight the current health crisis.

NUI Galway will host an online seminar to address the issues faced by universities amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The seminar, ‘Universities and the COVID-19 Crisis: Problems, Prospects and Pathways’, will take place on Thursday, 11 June at 5.30 pm (CET) (https://mooreinstitute.ie/event/universities-and-the-covid-19-crisis-problems-prospects-and-pathways/).

Immense challenges face universities as a result of COVID-19. Teaching missions have been complicated by the move to online instruction, with uncertainties about whether campus opening will be possible, requirements around social distancing, and how to engage new and existing students. The financial position of institutions is under threat due to reliance on international students to fund the system and reduced income generally. At the same time, universities are a source of vital research on the pandemic as society as a whole looks for a solution and plans for the future.

Dear ENLIGHT community, dear ENLIGHT partners,

We hereby express our strong commitment to jointly addressing the major global challenges that the COVID-19 pandemic is generating.

The causes and consequences of the pandemic relate to the five global challenges that ENLIGHT has engaged to address. Our health and well-being is being affected or jeopardized in an unprecedented way. Artificial intelligence and digital solutions play a key role in the crisis response. The disruption of the global economy resulting from the pandemic may increase polarization in our societies. Finally, the pandemic is not without impact on environmental emergencies such as climate change or energy use and circularity, and lessons learned from the economic shutdown give opportunities for reflection.

A dedicated Coronavirus/Covid-19 news section collects relevant news, calls and international updates from the ENLIGHT partner universities in response to the coronavirus and the COVID-19 pandemic.

See https://enlight-eu.org/index.php/university-about-us/news-events/covid-19

On 27 May 2020 ENLIGHT organizes an online seminar for experts and coordinators in international education and mobility of the nine partner universities to exchange and discuss their strategies and practices of dealing with the global pandemic caused by the Coronavirus.

The workshop 'Russia: What kind of Power' is organized by the Ghent University Russia Platform and the University of Tartu. It seeks to offer a platform for interdisciplinary discussions around different conceptualizations of power in the domestic and foreign relations of contemporary Russia.

Given the multiple research questions that the COVID-19 pandemic and crisis have opened up in relation to Russia’s power, the call for papers now also welcomes papers that deal with topics relating to the effects and implications of the current pandemic and crisis for Russia’s power, such as the new understanding of hybrid threats, Russian ‘health diplomacy’, disintegrative trends in the EU and the Eurasian Economic Union, COVID-19’s impact on the situation in eastern Ukraine, domestic decentralization within Russia and the new situation for Russophone communities in the Baltic states.

A dedicated Coronavirus/Covid-19 news section collects relevant news, calls and international updates from the ENLIGHT partner universities in response to the coronavirus and the COVID-19 pandemic.

See https://enlight-eu.org/index.php/university-about-us/news-events/covid-19

Each ENLIGHT university plays its role at best in tackling the global COVID-19 pandemic and is engaged in dedicated research.

For the purpose of sharing information among partners and other interested readers, we invite you to consult each partner's COVID-19 research web pages for updates and suggest a list of several others that you may wish to consult.

In the framework of INTEGRATE the Center for Research Training in Genomics Data Science based at NUI Galway is recruiting 10 PhD candidates to start in September 2020.

Actual number of infections may already have reached several tens of millions

The number of confirmed cases for the novel coronavirus disease COVID-19 officially issued by countries and widely commented on by national and international media outlets dramatically understates the true number of infections, a recent report from the University of Göttingen suggests. Dr Christian Bommer and Professor Sebastian Vollmer from Göttingen University have used estimates of COVID-19 mortality and time until death from a recent study published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases to test the quality of official case records. Their data shows that countries have only discovered on average about 6% of coronavirus infections and the true number of infected people worldwide may already have reached several tens of millions. Their study is available online at www.uni-goettingen.de/vollmer.