Following a decision by the President, Chalmers will establish two Deputy Presidents, one with responsibility for the academic environment and excellence and one with responsibility for leadership and equality. The Professors of Radio Astronomy and Innovation Management, Susanne Aalto and Maria Elmquist, will take up the positions in January.
This means that the responsibility for gender equality issues will be clearly pointed out in Chalmers’ top management and that working methods and areas of responsibility in the President’s Group will be adjusted somewhat following the change of President earlier in 2023.
“The longer the recruitment process has gone, the clearer it has become that these areas of responsibility must be closely linked, and it is important that they are formally equal in weight. Both roles are university-wide in a way that differs from the Vice Presidents, which have more strictly defined mandates focused on specific parts of operations,” says President Martin Nilsson Jacobi. “That is why we have chosen to design both of the new positions as Deputy President roles.”
The two Deputy Presidents will act as a complement to each other in the work going forward.
“You can see them as working in complementary dimensions, both of which are absolutely crucial to creating the Chalmers we want and which will be able to become a world-class technical university by 2041, in accordance with our long-term strategy. Susanne Aalto will be responsible for the development of the academic environment and excellence in research, education and utilisation, including doctoral education and collaboration with, for example, the Faculty Council, while Maria Elmquist will be responsible for the development of leadership and equality, including gender equality and the development of organisational conditions,” says Martin Nilsson Jacobi.
In 1994, Susanne Aalto became Sweden’s first female doctor of radio astronomy and she has been a professor since 2013. She has been a postdoc at the Steward Observatory, University of Arizona and at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in the United States, she is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences, and chair of the Chalmers Faculty Council.
“She is one of Chalmers’ most prominent researchers, firmly rooted in the international scientific community, which she has combined with a deep commitment to issues concerning the conditions for scientific research and not least for the entire faculty at Chalmers. She has extensive experience in leading evaluations of research and research infrastructure at national and international level. She has also initiated and runs her own international research networks funded by the European Research Council and, together with researchers at Chalmers and the University of Gothenburg, holds a grant from the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation.”
Maria Elmquist received her PhD in technology management in 2007 and has been a professor at Chalmers since 2014. She has been a postdoc at the Centre de Gestion Scientifique at Mines Paris – PSL and has remained an affiliate researcher there ever since. Between 2015 and 2022, she was Head of Department of TME.
“She is a well-established researcher in management and organisation of innovation in large technology companies and has broad experience of industry-related research. Her knowledge of leadership and organisational development is combined with solid experience of being a manager and leader at Chalmers, where she has been involved in driving development around the entrepreneurship initiatives. She has also been involved in gender equality work at TME and at Chalmers, where she has been a GENIE representative and a member of Fokus jämställdhet.”