Camilla Rygaard-Hjalsted took up the position as Dean of Sustainability, Diversity, Inclusion and Talent Development on 1 March this year. In this interview, she talks about how she wants to strengthen DTU as a diverse university. She also wants DTU to bring its strengths in green transition and absolute sustainability research even more into play to create systemic change in the transport, energy and construction sectors.
In her appointment, President Anders Bjarklev emphasised her clear vision of creating a clear vision to create impactful results. This commitment shines through clearly when the conversation turns to equality, talent development, and the need to get DTU's research for the green transition into society.
In the new Dean's view, there are plenty of challenges for DTU to address. The diversity agenda is under pressure, and achieving the green transition is daunting. At DTU, the diversity agenda needs to be strengthened, and sustainability research needs to go beyond the ramp so that DTU can create change nationally and internationally.
In the new political reality, many companies and organisations are considering whether to tone down their focus on diversity, equity and inclusion. How do we approach this at DTU?
On behalf of DTU's Board of Governors and Board of Directors, I can clearly state that our focus remains unchanged. We continue to work tirelessly on diversity, equity and inclusion, and we strive to treat everyone properly and give everyone equal rights. It is the right thing to do as an ethical and responsible university, and it is also a prerequisite for attracting the best talent to DTU - regardless of gender, age, nationality, religion, disabilities and more.
How will you further develop DTU as a diverse university with room for everyone?
DTU hasn't yet reached its goal of being a diverse university. We will only be when we emphasise people based on their competencies and nothing else.
We are well on our way, but I think we need a cultural shift at DTU. We need to articulate the culture we want and work purposefully to get there. Change takes time, but we can succeed if we have a clear direction and a commonly formulated goal.
One of the things I suggest is that we add 'diversity' to DTU's current values - 'innovative thinking, credibility and commitment'. We must insist on being a diverse university, and the values must show the way forward.
We want more female students and researchers at DTU. At the same time, various reports and studies have shown that it can still be challenging to be a woman at DTU. How do we improve this?
34% of the students we admit to DTU are women, and 16% of our professors are women. There are different reasons for this, but it doesn't change the fact that it's not good enough.
We can address this in several ways. We can start by physically visualising the women who have contributed significantly to science and engineering. Let's complement the pictures on the walls and in the boardroom of accomplished - perhaps even living - female scientists. Include textbooks and theory written by women in your teaching. Organise teaching with examples that recognise that students have different starting points and reference points. These small steps will significantly impact the feeling of being represented at DTU and giving everyone role models to look up to.
We must continue to recognise that inappropriate structures and discrimination exist in our environments and that we can and must do something about it.
You are also responsible for talent development within the PhD and professor areas. How do you see talent development at DTU?
When we educate PhDs, we educate the leaders who will take the lead and take responsibility for delivering solutions to the most important future agendas. They are talented, have academic drive, and have the skills to change the world. It is our responsibility as a university to give them the tools to be future academic leaders. We can work on this more systematically, and leadership is one of the things I want to look at more in the coming period.
"When it comes to appointing professors, I focus on recruiting people with academic, professional and didactic talent. But it's also essential that they are willing to take responsibility for diversity as teachers and research leaders. So, when I look at job adverts and assessment criteria, I keep these things in mind.
How do we get the areas of strength that DTU has identified in green transition research out into society?
The six current areas of strength represent research areas where DTU is particularly skilled in relation to society's green transition: transport, energy, construction, biosolutions, climate and food.
At DTU Centre for Absolute Sustainability, researchers create models for calculating the absolute sustainability of products and behaviour based on how many resources the planet has and can tolerate in terms of impacts on climate, biodiversity, and toxicity. They then develop technologies to create improvements and strategies to implement them in society.
Therefore, we should bring together all the research and knowledge we have on transport, energy and construction and superimpose the principles of absolute sustainability on them. In this way, we will have a strong starting point to create a systemic transformation of the most critical sectors for the green transition at the European level.
I would like to see this work led by DTU, and I have conversations with potential international partners who would like to collaborate with us in this area. DTU can provide solutions to the world's biggest environmental challenges right now, and we must actively work towards this.
One of your tasks as Dean of Sustainability is to establish a clear sustainability focus across DTU’s business areas and activities. How will you go about this?
We do a lot on DTU's campuses already - we've come a long way with biodiversity and our daily use of our facilities. The campus plans help us build and renovate responsibly. But I would like to see us move from fulfilling sustainability goals to aiming to create actual change that sufficiently reduces emissions, resource loss and pollution while increasing biodiversity. That's why the mindset of absolute sustainability must start with ourselves.
If we want to think big, we have incredibly talented people who can calculate what it takes for DTU's campuses, or at least parts of them, to become absolutely sustainable. We have the competencies, and that's an obligation, so let's take the lead and show how we can create impact ourselves.
Working with sustainability and diversity gives us a purpose - something we can participate in and contribute to across all groups and units at DTU. We are in a good place, but we can go much further. And this applies to all the areas where I now have the great pleasure of taking responsibility.
