Here are the 13 new Honorary Skou Professors
Health is appointing 13 new international top researchers as special adjunct professors. They are all receiving the title of Honorary Skou Professor and will help strengthen the faculty’s profile as an international research and educational institution.
About the Honorary Skou Professors
- The purpose of the Honorary Skou initiative is to bring new perspectives to teaching, strengthen ties to leading research units abroad, and establish joint research projects and grant applications.
- The special adjunct professors receiving the title of Honorary Skou Professor come from leading universities around the world and are recognised experts in their fields.
- Each Honorary Skou Professor is assigned a “champion” – a disciplinary colleague at one of the departments. The champion acts as host and ensures the international colleague is integrated into the academic environment and that the collaboration gets off to a good start.
- Honorary Skou Professors are appointed for a five-year period with the possibility of extension.
- In 2019, Health appointed 47 Honorary Skou Professors and another 18 in 2023. From 2026, 13 newly appointed Honorary Skou Professors will join the group. Health now has a total of 65 honorary professors. See the list of Skou Professors on the faculty’s website (the 13 new appointees will be added shortly).
In 2018, a total of 47 foreign professors were appointed with this special honorary title for the first time, and in 2023 a further 18 Honorary Skou Professors followed.
The initiative has been such a great success that the Dean’s Office has decided to continue the programme, and from the new year, Health can welcome 13 talented researchers from six different countries.
Joint grant applications and PhD supervision
Since the initiative was launched nearly eight years ago, the collaboration between the Honorary Skou Professors and their “champions” – their academic contact persons at the departments – has taken many forms.
The Honorary Skou Professors have, among other things, taught PhD courses, co-applied for EU grants, hosted journal clubs, co-supervised PhD projects, and contributed to research activities.
“Activities under the Honorary Skou collaboration have been highly diverse, but what they all have in common is that the partnership has given us new perspectives on research and teaching, and it has strengthened our ties to leading international research institutions – exactly as intended,” says Vice-Dean for Research Per Brøndsted Höllsberg.
He is therefore pleased that 13 new international researchers are now joining the group of Honorary Skou Professors and champions:
“The formalised collaboration between the Honorary Skou Professors and the academic communities at the departments has been productive and rewarding, so we are excited and curious to see what this new group of Honorary Skou Professors and champions will achieve together.”
Here is the list of the new Honorary Skou Professors and their champions
Department of Dentistry and Oral Health
- Henry (Hal) Fergus Duncan, Trinity College Dublin
- Champion: Lise-Lotte Kirkevang
- Joseph V. Hajnal, King’s College London
- Champion: Rubens Spin-Neto
Department of Public Health
- Sarah Wild, Edinburgh University
- Champion: Annelli Sandbæk
Department of Biomedicine
- Ewout Hoorn, Erasmus Medical Center
- Champion: Robert A. Fenton
- Pawel Swietach, Oxford University
- Champion: Ebbe Bødtkjer
Department of Clinical Medicine
- Joy E. Lawn, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine
- Champion: Erzsébet Horváth-Puhó
- Renske Steenbergen, Amsterdam University Medical Center
- Champion: Mette Tranberg
- Christopher Kabrhel, Harvard Medical School
- Champion: Mads Dam Lyhne
- Marylise Boutros, Cleveland Clinic Florida / McGill University
- Champion: Peter Christensen
- Anthony Christopher Vernon, King’s College London
- Champion: Anne M. Landau
- Bruce Rosen, Harvard Medical School
- Champion: Leif Østergaard
- Uma Mahadevan, University of California San Francisco
- Champion: Mette Julsgaard
- Ulf Ziemann, University of Tübingen
- Champion: Hatice Tankisi
The Honorary Skou Professors will be celebrated and formally inducted at a ceremony in autumn 2026.
Contact
Vice-Dean for Research Per Brøndsted Höllsberg
Aarhus University, Health
Phone: +45 51 36 23 53
Email: pbh@au.dk
This text is based on machine translation