Nice intake of external funding
Looking at our intake of external funding, it has been a good year for us and our faculty is certainly supporting the external funding strategy at SDU.
Dear staff
The foundations have been in a Christmas mood for the past month, and many grants have found their way to our faculty. Well done to everyone! We receive great praise for contributing to SDU’s external funding strategy.
We are especially proud that we have once again managed to take home an ERC Consolidator. This time it is Professor Fabrizio Montesi from the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science (IMADA), who works with computer programming. Big congratulations to Fabrizio and IMADA.
Last week in Kiel, I participated in the meeting where funds from Interreg Deutschland-Danmark were distributed. SDU received 3 grants out of 9. Two of these will be managed by the SDU Climate Cluster.
The evaluation process is very thorough, as is known from the EU. The project applications go through a comprehensive evaluation before they are presented by the Interreg secretariat in plenary.
The Danish and German members of the Interreg council each hold pre-meetings to discuss the recommendations from the secretariat and get a common understanding of the individual applications. It is interesting to participate in these discussions between politicians from the region and municipalities and from educational institutions.
There is a lot of interest in the projects, but also many different perspectives on what the projects must deliver. In general, there is a great will from both sides to strengthen the development of the region.
In order to meet the many perspectives, the projects are often granted with a number of requirements, such as the involvement of several partners to increase the projects' impact.
Anyone who has sat on assessment committees knows that it can be an extremely difficult process to reach agreement on the selection of projects. This was unfortunately the case in the 1st round of flagship centers in the collaboration between SDU and the Odense University Hospital (OUH).
The process was largely organized based on good experiences from OUH’s elite centres, but it turned out not to be so fitting. For the flagship centres, there is a requirement for a large interdisciplinary approach with the involvement of at least one faculty in addition to OUH and the Faculty of Health Sciences, and it proved difficult to assess the applications.
Only one flagship centre came through, even though there was funding for 2 centers. The two boards of directors have evaluated the process and have just agreed to initiate a new round with the distribution of a flagship centre in 2024.
I hope that there will be interest in submitting applications from the Faculty of Science with an improved assessment process. I see great potential for exciting and important research in the collaboration with OUH and the Faculty of Health Sciences.
This week SDU celebrates its 25th anniversary with a series of speeches with highlights from the time as SDU.
I remember very well the difficult start for SDU at our faculty. Many of us who were extremely worried about having to "change universities" in the middle of our research careers.
How would it be perceived by our business partners? And would it affect our citations? Would the Faculty of Sciences have to be present on several campuses, and what about the finances?
Fortunately, the various databases were quick to catch the name change on publications. It is only now in 2023 that we are seriously talking about setting up education programmes outside Odense.
SDU has done well in several cities and plays a significant role in Sønderborg, Esbjerg and Kolding, while it has not succeeded in Slagelse, which is why it has now been decided to close the campus.
We expect a decision regarding Data Science in Kolding next week, and it could be a new chapter for us with a significant presence outside Odense.
Congratulations to SDU on its first 25 years.
Marianne Holmer, dean