In graduate programmes, future academics from various disciplines are given the opportunity to conduct their doctorate and postdoctoral lecturing studies in the framework of coordinated research projects run by many members of the University's academic staff. This results in the integration of future academics in the research work of the project concerned, whereby the individual specialisations of the participants are supplemented and expanded. The interdisciplinary orientation of the research and study programme is therefore one of its essential aspects.

Five graduate programmes exist at Greifswald University, 'Contact Zone Mare Balticum: Alienation and Integration in the Baltic Sea Region', 'Interaction between Pathogen and Host in Generalised Bacterial Infections', 'The Alfried-Krupp Graduate Programme for Tumour Biology', 'Age-Gender-Society' and the 'International Max Planck Research School on Bounded Plasmas'.

'Contact Zone Mare Balticum: Alienation and Integration in the Baltic Sea Region' is run by the Philosophical Faculty together with the Political Science Faculty. The Baltic Sea Region has been in the past and is still today a zone of productive exchange-relations. It is therefore particularly suitable as the object and stage of a longer-term study and research programme, bringing together various academic disciplines with the aim of comprehending the forms and effects of foreign contact - from exclusion to integration - and analysing them against the background of specific social and political conditions.

An interdisciplinary team of 14 faculty members of the Medicine and Mathematics and Natural Sciences Faculties supervises the individual project-work in the graduate programme 'Interaction between Pathogen and Host in Generalised Bacterial Infections'. A workshop regularly brings together all members of the programme in order to exchange ideas, review the progress of individual projects and to continually update and redefine common scientific strategies.

The major research focuses of 'The Alfried-Krupp Graduate Programme for Tumour Biology' are on the molecular and cellular-biological analysis of tumour cell resistance and the characterisation of special tumour cells with the use of RNA and proteome analysis, as well as epidemiological and molecular-genetic investigations into the occurrence and progression of tumours.

The task of the postdoctoral programme 'Age-Gender-Society' is, again, to combine a pressing medical and health-political issue with further-reaching perspectives from Cultural Studies and, in doing so, to put into action often-demanded cooperation between supposedly separate academic cultures. In the programme, established in the Greifswald University Interdisciplinary Centre for Women's and Gender Studies, research into age is combined with the gender perspective and developed on the basis of a model.

The Max-Planck Institute has, together with the Ernst-Moritz-Arndt-University and the Leibniz Institute for Low-Temperature Plasma Physics, built a research and teaching centre for plasma technology and fusion research. The interdisciplinary research programme of the International Max Planck Research School on Bounded Plasmas combines Plasma Physics, fusion research, computer physics and boundary-layer research. In the programme, stretching over six semesters, twelve professors and seven private lecturers, as well as numerous external experts, offer special lectures, compact courses and work experience, as well as annual summer courses.