As of 1 February 2017, Professor Birgit Schiøtt has been appointed head of the Department of Chemistry, where she has been acting head of department since December 2014.

Dean Niels Chr. Nielsen is pleased that she is continuing in the position.

“Birgit Schiøtt is a talented and extremely popular head of department, and she has also contributed constructively to the work of the Faculty Management Team during the last two years. I’m therefore very satisfied that she chose to apply for the position, and I look forward to continuing our collaboration,” he says.

Professor Schiøtt is also looking forward to continuing her work at the Department of Chemistry.

“We’re in the midst of some interesting challenges in our core tasks. Right now, the area of education is being reorganised into a semester structure, which is very involved – here it’s important to take the opportunity to raise the quality of the degree programmes. At the same time, we’re being challenged by the Study Progress Reform. I look forward to helping to ensure that we deal with both issues as well as possible without destroying the benefits and well-being of the students. In the coming years, we’ll be changing course to a different form of funding in the area of research, just as we must focus at the same time on ensuring the next growth segment of talented young researchers, who are bringing interesting new research fields to the Department of Chemistry. These are just some of the major tasks that must be solved and implemented in the coming years, and I’m looking forward to being a part of it all,” she says.

In addition to her management tasks, Professor Schiøtt still participates actively in research. She is head of the Biomodelling Group at the Department of Chemistry, which works on the mutual correlations between proteins and other biomolecules, with a particular focus on the chemistry of the brain. However, she also works on other topics, such as peptides involved in type 2 diabetes and different technologically important peptides and proteins. She is also affiliated with iNANO and is involved in many collaborative projects with medicinal and biotechnological companies and academic research groups in Denmark and abroad. These include the University of Oxford, the University of California, San Diego, and the University of Illinois, as well as currently working with both Novozymes and Lundbeck in Denmark and Aptinyx in the USA.

Professor Schiøtt completed her MSc in Chemistry and Physics in 1990 and her PhD in Chemistry in 1993 at Aarhus University, and spent a one-year study period at both Cornell University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the USA. She was a postdoctoral fellow for one year at the Department of Chemistry and subsequently for two years at the University of California, Santa Barbara. During the period 1994–1996 and again from 1998 to 2000, she taught for four years altogether at the Cathedral Upper Secondary School in Aarhus, after which she returned to Aarhus University. Here she was a Steno research fellow from 2001 to 2003 and a Skou research fellow from 2004 to 2006. She became a tenured associate professor in 2007 and, just two years later, was appointed professor with special responsibilities (MSO) in Biomodelling and Medicinal Chemistry. She was appointed Professor of Biocomputational Chemistry in 2014.

For more information, please contact

Head of Department Birgit Schiøtt
Department of Chemistry
Aarhus University
birgit@chem.au.dk
+45 2982 6882