By Nelly Sander, TECH Dean’s Office

Mikael B. Skov, age 53, will start in his position as the new vice dean for research at the Technical Faculty of IT and Design on 1 August this year. He is a computer scientist with a PhD from AAU and is currently a professor in the Department of Computer Science. He is no stranger to management as he currently heads the research group Human-Centred Computing. His specific research area is human-computer interaction, and his latest focus area is human-centred artificial intelligence that broadly deals with the user-focused element of AI technology.

A solution-oriented and visionary leader

As vice dean, Mikael B. Skov joins the faculty management. Dean Thomas Bak is looking forward to the collaboration and to having him on board. He is sure that Mikael B. Skov is the right person for the post:

With Mikael, we get a solution-oriented, visionary leader who is able to identify opportunities and create meaningful results across disciplines. I am certain that his ability to translate research strategy into concrete action will make him a valuable driving force for the faculty.

The research environments have an important role in working on missions

Mikael B. Skov sees many exciting opportunities and challenges in the position as vice dean for research and is really looking forward to taking on new tasks. It is clear to him that the research environments at TECH can and should play significant roles in the future work on missions at AAU.

− The TECH environments have competencies and knowledge in areas such as digitalisation, sustainability, design and planning. I see many of these as extremely important for the work on the missions. For me, the missions are also important as it is becoming increasingly essential that our research is applied directly in the surrounding community, provides real value and is instrumental in solving real, complicated problems, says Mikael B. Skov.

He sees his own competencies playing a role in inspiring and facilitating the research environments to collaborate on missions, because his own research is very interdisciplinary, and he thus has extensive experience working on interdisciplinary research projects. He has a clear goal of working closely with TECH's departments and research environments and hopes to visit them early in his tenure as vice dean.

In his private life, Mikael B. Skov is married to Charlotte, has two children and lives in Gistrup. He is passionate about football as a spectator for his two favourite teams AaB and Manchester United. He has season tickets to Aalborg Stadium and has been to Manchester United's home turf Old Trafford four times.