New Year Greetings from the Faculty Management of SCIENCE

Dear colleagues and students,

 

Welcome to 2012 and to our new faculty. 2012 not only marks the beginning of a new working year. It also marks the first year of our new faculty, the result of the merger of the NAT and LIFE faculties and all their competent staff and students.

 

The faculty will be known as the Faculty of Science (in Danish ‘Det Natur- og Biovidenskabelige Fakultet’), or simply as SCIENCE. The names will be finalised by the University of Copenhagen board at the end of January. But what sort of faculty are we then? What sort of a workplace do we want to create?

 

The vision is for SCIENCE to be perceived by students, staff and partners as a research and educational environment which – within a number of academic fields – offers the best opportunities worldwide for addressing the national and global challenges we are currently facing.

 

This means that we must continue to build on our strong academic performance – while combining our abilities within our various fields of expertise in new and innovative ways. In particular, we must work hard to bring the various academic disciplines together in our new departments and research/discipline-specific groups.

 

This can be done if we are open, respectful and work together internally and with our colleagues from other disciplines, departments, faculties and institutions.

We must focus more on our external partners – because making sure that our knowledge benefits the business community and society at large contributes to our development and helps to secure and increase our sources of funding.

 

We must organise study programmes and study environments of the highest possible standard – thereby ensuring that we produce the best possible graduates for jobs in both the private and public sectors.

 

We must work harder to attract external funding – because our basic funding is being cut and the future of the faculty therefore depends on access to more sources of competitive research funding.

 

And together we must develop a new and efficient administration both at faculty and departmental levels as this is decisive to producing the best possible research and offering the best possible study programmes, while ensuring the highest level of innovation and communication of knowledge.

 

We are already very good at a lot of these things today. But we believe that we may become even better, and this is necessary to fulfil our vision. We must therefore identify the strengths which each and every one of us brings to the new faculty, proceeding to jointly nurture and further develop these strengths. We must create a workplace which is characterised by a high level of well-being and mutual respect for our different strengths and values, while at the same time working towards fulfilling the shared vision for our new faculty.

 

In 2012, a lot of energy will be going into ensuring the successful realisation of the merger and into finding out how best to achieve our objectives. And this will require our joint efforts.

 

It will be a year of new challenges and opportunities. Our job is to create the best possible opportunities for each and every one of you, while encouraging you to work for the new faculty as a whole.

 

We hope that you will involve yourselves actively in creating, seizing and making the most of the many opportunities which our new faculty will bring.

 

Happy New Year!

 

Kind regards,

Faculty of SCIENCE management