DIAS and SDU aim at academia’s rising stars with prestigious new positions
The Danish Institute for Advanced Study (DIAS) makes a bold leap forward by hiring tenured professors alongside a new cohort of tenure track research fellows.
In 2025, ten DIAS Professors and up to ten DIAS Fellows will join SDU’s elite centre for interdisciplinary research. Each of SDU’s five faculties will welcome both Fellows and Professors, who will hold dual affiliations with DIAS and a faculty department, actively contributing to both.
Last year, DIAS and SDU successfully launched a pioneering tenure track initiative for DIAS Fellows. This year, DIAS and SDU skyrocket their aspirations by also recruiting tenured professors who, through a DIAS professorship, are expected to leave a distinct mark of excellence on the University. The strategic decision to hire Professors alongside Fellows aligns perfectly with DIAS’s ethos of excellence and SDU’s ambition to recruit top-level international scholars.
DIAS Professors
The new DIAS professorships target scholars with internationally recognised research profiles and excellent publication records. With exceptional skills in mentoring, teaching, outreach, and community-building, DIAS Professors will be leading figures whose presence, engagement, and contributions will significantly impact the University of Southern Denmark. DIAS Professors will be integrated into DIAS’s community of distinguished Chairs.
DIAS Fellows
The highly coveted DIAS tenure track fellowships target early-career researchers with extraordinary potential and promising career trajectories. DIAS Fellows are ambitious, innovative, and expansive-thinking scholars with international profiles and strong emerging records of research. In line with DIAS’s unique and ambitious research aims, DIAS Fellows, who are hired at the assistant professor level, have reduced teaching obligations compared to regular assistant professor positions at SDU. DIAS Fellows will be integrated into the Society of Fellows, a community by and for DIAS’s early-career researchers.
Playful excellence and big ideas
The prestigious positions at the Danish Institute for Advanced Study represent a unique opportunity for the world’s best and brightest scholars to bring their expertise to the forefront of academia. DIAS Professors and Fellows will be significantly engaged and present at DIAS, receiving in return a hospitable home for big thinking and ample opportunities to explore and expand the frontiers of knowledge.
DIAS is home to a thriving intellectual landscape consisting of Fellows, Senior Fellows, and Chairs from across the five faculties at SDU. The new Fellows and Professors will become part of a community that engages and collaborates across disciplines and levels of seniority. Playfulness is a cornerstone in DIAS’s pursuit of excellence: we believe that creativity thrives when ideas can flow freely, and we empower our community to ask bold questions and pursue answers in novel ways.