Aarhus University Seal

The dean's office is moving to the University Park

Close by. That is the mantra behind the decision to relocate the dean’s office – and associated functions –from the yellow-brick buildings on Nordre Ringgade to the white-clad Victor Albeck Building in the middle of the University Park. The removal boxes should be ready for moving around 1 February 2018.

Dean Lars Bo Nielsen wishes to be closer to the students and the academic environments at Health. Together with the rest of the dean's office, he will therefore be moving out of the senior management team’s buildings on Nordre Ringgade at the beginning of the new year, and instead relocating to the Victor Albeck Building – also known as the former maternity unit or simply VAB in university jargon.

The background for the move is a desire for increased proximity to the academic environments and the students.

"It is important for me to have a close dialogue with students, researchers and other employees at the faculty. You can be visible in many ways, but emails, phone calls and other channels of communication cannot replace the opportunity of making personal contact easy," says Dean Lars Bo Nielsen.

He makes no secret of the fact that he wants to see more cooperation across the faculty.

"I believe that physical proximity can help to strengthen both academic and personal relationships. We are a large organisation, so of course it is not realistic for everyone to know everyone else, but this is still important in our everyday lives," says Lars Bo Nielsen.

The plan is for the dean, vice-deans and faculty secretariat to have offices on the second floor of the Victor Albeck Building, where different staff from AU Library’s health sciences are presently located. Both the library staff and the library itself will remain in the building, but in other rooms. The move will not have any impact on the reading room situation for the students.

The Victor Albeck Building is centrally located in the University Park between the departments of biomedicine, public health and odontology. Health's studies administration has premises at the Aarhus School of Dentistry, the IT unit is located at both the Aarhus School of Dentistry and in the Bartholin Building, while the faculty's communication unit has been based in VAB since the autumn of 2012.

Employees at the departments in Skejby, clinical medicine and forensic medicine will also have easy access to the dean's office as the light rail transit has a stop on Nørrebrogade right opposite VAB.

With the move to VAB, Health is now the third faculty to vacate AU's headquarters on Nordre Ringgade. Science and Technology and Aarhus BSS have previously chosen to relocate closer to their academic environments.

The Victor Albeck Building can be found here