Members of Freie Universität demonstrated against the Berlin Senate’s decision to close the Department of Medicine at Freie Universität and convert the Benjamin Franklin University Hospital (UKBF) into a municipal hospital. The protest was successful: in 2003, the medical department of Freie Universität Berlin and the medical faculty of Humboldt-Universität merged to form Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, the joint medical school operated by Freie Universität and Humboldt-Universität. The UKBF, which had just celebrated its 50th anniversary, was to become the Benjamin Franklin Campus of Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin.

Mars on Earth: The special camera on board the European Mars Express space probe, developed by scientists at Freie Universität working with planetary researcher Gerhard Neukum, sent first images of the red planet. The picture shows the Neukum Crater, which was named after the planetary researcher who died in 2014.

Freie Universität opened a liaison office in New York. It was the university’s first office abroad. Liaison offices in Beijing and New Delhi followed in 2007, in Brussels in 2009, and in Cairo, São Paulo, and Moscow in 2010. The task of the liaison offices is to support researchers at Freie Universität in international networking, to make Freie Universität’s profile more visible in the target regions, and to promote the recruitment of outstanding junior scholars and scientists.

The Philological Library was opened. Designed by the British architect Lord Norman Foster, it is another landmark for Freie Universität in Dahlem. The library, called “The Berlin Brain” because of its shape, integrated eleven sublibraries with 700,000 books.

Freie Universität was one of the winners in the German federal and state governments’ Excellence Initiative, making it one of nine “Universities of Excellence” in Germany. Its concepts for graduate schools, clusters of excellence, and its development strategy for an “International Network University” were deciding factors. The previous year, in the first round of the Excellence Initiative, the Berlin Mathematical School, a joint institution of Freie Universität, Humboldt-Universität, and Technische Universität, had already been selected for funding through the Excellence Initiative.