The Berlin Graduate School of Natural Sciences and Engineering (BIG-NSE) is part of the Cluster of Excellence "Unifying Concepts in Catalysis" (UniCat) founded in November 2007 by the Technical University of Berlin and five further institutions in the Berlin area within the framework of the German government‘s Excellence Initiative.
The main research interest of the UniCat and BIG-NSE Faculty is Catalysis, in a broad sense. The research fields involved cover a broad range of topics, from natural sciences to engineering. The faculty consists of professors and junior researchers from 54 research groups at 6 participating institutions and active in 13 research fields, who will be intensively involved in the supervision and mentoring of the BIG-NSE students, among them the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society, the working place of Professor Gerhard Ertl, the winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2007.