New Chairs at DIAS

At the beginning of 2023, DIAS welcomed 5 new Chairs from different faculties of the University of Southern Denmark:

Vijay Tiwari, new DIAS Chair of Health Sciences, is a Professor and Dr. med. at the department of Molecular Medicine at the Faculty of Health at SDU. He is a Full Professor in neurobiology and comes from a Professorship at Queens University in the UK. His education and research has spanned leading Institutions across six countries. Originally educated in Molecular and Human Genetics at the Banaras Hindu University in India he obtained his PhD from Uppsala University in Sweden with Post Doc stays at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, USA, and Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research (FMI), Basel, Switzerland. He started his independent research career at the Institute of Molecular Biology in Germany before moving to the UK. His research applies a highly multidisciplinary approach to uncover the communication between genetic and epigenetic information in determining cell identity and how this goes awry in diseases.

Norbert Krüger, Full Professor and new Chair of Engineering, has been employed at the University of Southern Denmark since 2006. Since having finalized his Master’s in mathematics and philosophy in 1993, Norbert Krüger has established an interdisciplinary research and teaching profile at five universities in three different countries. His research focuses on industrial robotics, machine learning and human-robot-interaction. 

Norbert Krüger has also been working in core industrial robotics. In that context, he coordinated two EU projects as well as a Danish national project ReRoPro. His main scientific focus was on the learning of gripper structures for industrial applications by simulation and optimization. Today, this approach is used in the I4.0 lab at SDU. From 2012 onwards, Norbert Krüger supported the development of the Welfare Robotics Group at SDU Robotics. 

Annette Baudisch, new Chair of Business and Social Sciences, is Full Professor WSR and Director at the Interdisciplinary Centre of Population Dynamics at SDU, CPop. Baudisch’s research interests are concept and theory development, modeling, the evolution of ageing, demography, ageing research, mortality trajectories and fertility patterns.

As a mathematician and demographer by training with insights into biology, economics, and computer sciences, her research advances concepts, theories, and methods to study age patterns of mortality and fertility. She recently received an ERC Consolidator Grant for her project "Born once – Die once". 

Gregory Clark, new Chair of Business and Social Sciences, is a newly employed Full Professor of Economics at the Historical Economics and Development Group, HEDG, at SDU. He is a Distinguished Professor of Economics at University of California, Davis, and a Visiting Professor in the Economic History Department at the London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE. He is a world-renowned researcher in Quantitative Economic History and has published two widely cited books on international economic history: A Farewell to Alms – A Brief Economic History of the World (Princeton UP, 2007); and The Son Also Rises: Surnames and Social Mobility (Princeton UP, 2014).

The key research idea, which has led to his moving to the Economics Department of the University of Southern Denmark, is to apply Clark’s innovative techniques to the Human Capital of the Nordic Countries (HCNC) database (funded by the Carlsberg Foundation to PI prof. Paul Sharp at SDU) over multiple generations in Denmark and Norway, spanning 1790 to 1940.

Nina Bonderup Dohn, new Chair of Humanities, is a Full Professor in Learning and ICT at the Department of Design and Communication at SDU. She holds a dr.phil. in educational philosophy with the dissertation Epistemological concerns – querying the learning field from a philosophical point of view, defended on 21.9.2017 at the SDU, Kolding.

She is Head of the Center for Learning Computational Thinking, an interdisciplinary center involving researchers from the Faculty of Humanities (Department of Design and Communication and Department for the Study of Culture), the Faculty of Science (Department of Mathematics and Computer Science) and the Faculty of Engineering (Maersk-McKinney Moller Institute). She also leads the research program Learning, Design and Digitalization at the Department of Design and Communication.

She currently (2020-2024) holds a research grant from Independent Research Fund Denmark for the project Designing for Situated Computational Thinking with Computational Things which involves researchers from three Danish universities and four international ones (in Great Britain, Australia, and the Netherlands). She recently finalized another project, Designing for Situated Knowledge in a World of Change, also financed by Independent Research Fund Denmark

Sten Rynning, new Chair of Business and Social Sciences, is Full Professor in Business and Social Sciences at SDU. He works in the War Studies tradition with a focus on war, alliance cooperation, and efforts to control and rein in the use of armed force. His current research projects include NATO's history and current trajectory: as NATO responds to Russia's war in Ukraine, how does NATO's history of collective defence weigh in on its diplomacy and policy options? Can NATO respond to the challenge posed by China and yet remain primarily invested in European defence and deterrence?

Rynning will publish a book on NATO's history and implications hereof with Yale University Press in the spring of 2024. Sten Rynning has been a visiting researcher at the School of International Service, American University, Washington, DC (2017) and the NATO Defence College (NDC), Rome (2012) as well as having participated in various government commissions in Denmark and Norway.