Newsletter 74 from the Head of Department

INTERNALLY AT THE INSTITUTE

News from the Hygiene Committee: New procedures and important reminders
The Institute's Hygiene Committee has a few updates that you should be aware of in your daily tasks:

• Trios scanner heads must now be cleaned in Presept.
• Surgical caps are no longer required for staining. Instead, the fountain must be thoroughly cleaned after use.
• The face mask must be removed when leaving the unit – no face masks in, for example, hallways.
• The used patient napkin must be removed if a patient leaves the clinic chair in the middle of a treatment, and a new one must be placed before the patient sits down again – in other words; patients should not walk around with a used napkin around their neck.

Courses and online training for employees are now in the new Brightspace universe
We have an employee page in Brightspace (Aarhus University's Learning Management System), and videos, online training and courses for employees will be located here. The page is being continuously expanded with more content, for example about the electronic patient record system 'KLIPS', and right now you can find:

• Five videos about clinical behaviour and hygiene at IOOS (with English subtitles)
• Online course in practical cardiopulmonary resuscitation (in Danish and English).

Please note that all IOOS employees must complete the relevant courses once a year - preferably around the start of the semester in September - and you can now do this via Brightspace: https://brightspace.au.dk/d2l/le/discovery/view/course/193739

RESEARCH, EDUCATION AND TEACHING

The 2025 Teachers of the Year have been named
December is also the time of year when the Teachers of the Year are found and celebrated. As is tradition, it is the students who nominate and vote on who – one teacher per study board – should receive extra recognition and the title of Teacher of the Year 2025. Congratulations on the honorable title to:

• Clinical Instructor at the dental hygienist education and subject teacher in dental morphology at the dental hygienist and clinical dental technician educations Charlotte Huber
• Clinical Instructor at the dental education Michael Jessen   

This year's teacher bouquets from the 9th semester revue theatre at the dental education were awarded to Clinical Instructor at the master's clinic Iris Möbes and Senior Clinical Instructor at the Section for Maxillofacial Surgery and Oral Pathology Ole Möbes. What a recognition!

January 18, 2026 is the deadline for reporting publications in Pure
Research publications from 2025 must be registered in Pure no later than January 18, 2026. It is important to check whether the Open Access status is stated correctly.

Correct reporting is extremely important for the university, so that we fulfill the agreements made with the Ministry of Higher Education and Science regarding scientific work (which is reported via Pure) and the proportion of publications that are freely available to everyone via Open Access.

If you have trouble reporting, please contact Aarhus University's Pure Support, and if you have questions about Open Access, Open Access support can help at oa@kb.dk.

We will have two new Honorary Skou Professors affiliated with the department
Professor Henry (Hal) Fergus Duncan from Trinity College in Dublin and Professor Joseph V. Hajnal from King’s College in London will be affiliated with IOOS for the next five years as special adjunct professors under the title of Honorary Skou Professors. The Faculty of Health’s initiative with the formally affiliated international top researchers began in 2018 and has been such a great success – also at our department – ​​that the format will continue.

The two new Honorary Skou Professors will be affiliated with the department thanks to their professional contact persons, so-called champions, respectively Professor Lise-Lotte Kirkevang and Professor Rubens Spin-Neto. It will be exciting to see what the collaboration brings.

See the complete list of the department’s Honorary Skou Professors on the Faculty of Health’s website.

Would you like to participate in “Book a Scientist”?
The lecture format “Book a Scientist” is part of the nationwide science festival ‘Forskningens Døgn’, which is organized by the Danish Ministry of Higher Education and Research. Last year, the initiative attracted over 18,000 participants, divided into 508 lectures by 241 researchers.

This year, the science festival will take place from April 20 - 26, 2026.

If any of you have the time, desire and opportunity to participate and try your hand at sharing your knowledge with the general public, then “Book a Scientist” might be an idea? There is also an offer for an online dissemination workshop in early spring, so that you would be prepared for the task.

The registration deadline is January 26, 2026, and you can read more on the Danish Science Festival website.

NEWS ABOUT NAMES

20 million DKK for the interdisciplinary project on a ‘correlative imaging facility’
Professor Sebastian Schlafer, together with colleagues from the Faculty of Natural Sciences at Aarhus University and the University of Southern Denmark, has applied for and received a huge grant of 20 million DKK from the Novo Nordisk Foundation. The money will primarily be invested in a series of microscopes that will physically be located at the Department of Biology here at Aarhus University. The microscopes enable a workflow that visualises microbiological samples through a series of analyses that are carried out in sequence. Congratulations – impressive.

“The professional relay” took a round on IOOS
The Danish Dental Journal has an article series, the professional relay, where different people within all areas of the dental profession answer a question posed by the previous participant. In November, Section Head and Associate Professor Louise Hauge Matzen participated. Yasser Haddadi, who is, among other things, a Departmental Senior Clinical Dentist in our Highly Specialised Treatment Unit (HSBE), had chosen to pass the professional relay on to Louise and asked: “How do you navigate and prioritise the intersection between research, teaching and clinical relevance?”. You can read Louise’s answer in the article “My heart beats for teaching” [In Danish].

Two dental students receive DKK 372,000 to research oral diseases
The Danish Dental Association has awarded two scholarships of DKK 186,000 each, and they have both been awarded to two of our talented dental students, who are about to start a research years: Abas Jafari will research the rare disease Burning Mouth Syndrome, and Simon Filip Pascu will research the most widespread non-communicable disease in the world, caries. Congratulations.

Wishing you all a Merry Festive Season, a joyful holiday, and a good New Year,

Siri