Summer greeting from the dean

Dear staff members

With the summer holidays approaching, I would like to take the opportunity to send all my summer greetings.

There is at present a massive focus on the many challenges the Danish universities are facing these years, not at least among our students and staff members. These challenges embrace an increasingly restrictive financial situation for our degree programmes, cutbacks in public funding, but on top of that an expected decline in private funding. In June, the board of AU approved the proposal from the Senior Management Team for a total budget for AU. The budget aims at supporting the academic milieu and, at the same time, to allow space for strategic investments. With the approved budget, the Faculty Management Team has a solid platform for approaching future challenges.

To achieve balance in our budget has been one of our three high-priority focus areas for 2016. To contribute to AU obtaining institutional accreditation and to increase the amount of external research funding have been two other high-priority areas that will still be in focus in the autumn. Further, the Faculty Management Team will begin their focus on selecting the high-priority strategic focus areas for 2017.

Another important task that will be initiated in the autumn the revision of the degree programmes in medicine and dentistry. These revisions will be made with the involvement of our students and staff members, but also with inputs from our many important stake holders outside AU.

As you know, our board approved the merge the Department of Dentistry and School of Oral Health Care into one department, i.e. the Department of Dentistry and Oral Health. The merge will be operational August 1st, when our new department head - Siri Beier Jensen - takes up her position. We all look forward to working with Siri.

At the Department of Public Health, a process of recruiting a new department head is underway, and I hope we will be able to present the successor of Søren Kjærgaard, rather soon.

In the autumn, we also look forward to welcome Health's International Advisory Board. Our Advisory Board, which comprises experts within the academic areas of Health, will visit us on September 8-9th, 2016. We have high expectations of their ability to provide Health with qualified advice in relation to our degree programmes, research and interaction with the surrounding society.

At last – but not least - I would like to take this opportunity to thank you for all your efforts and hard work for AU.

I wish you all a nice and joyful summer!

The very best regards,

Allan Flyvbjerg