Meetings were held last week with the cleaning assistants who clean a number of Aarhus University buildings. The management is considering inviting tenders for cleaning at 51 buildings, which is currently performed by employees of the administrative centres at Aarhus BSS, Arts and ST.
The university is by no means dissatisfied with the standard of cleaning at present. Rather, the background for the proposal to invite tenders is that as a state sector institution, Aarhus University has an obligation to periodically review its technical and administrative operational tasks to assess whether it would be advantage to have them performed by external contractors.
At present, the university is assessing whether to invite tenders for cleaning at the buildings in question. The liaison committees and union representatives will be involved in the process until 19 February and can contribute input on the proposal.
Monday last week saw the conclusion of another municipal agreement, this time between Aarhus University and the Municipality of Horsens.
The main elements of the agreement involve matchmaking between students/graduates and local companies looking for a highly educated workforce, and also establishment of a demonstration laboratory. This laboratory will work in close cooperation with AU researchers to create new solutions in the fields of technology, materials science and digitisation, working particularly with Smart City and Industry 4.0 technologies.
The Junior Researcher Development Programme is a targeted programme for young researchers aiming for a career in the private sector. This programme, which has supported competency development among young researchers at AU over the past year, has been extended to 2019-2020. Besides this, the structure has been adapted so that the programme now includes four career pathways: the aim of this is to provide broader career profiles for AU’s talented researchers.
VILLUM FONDEN – the Villum Foundation – has recently selected new Villum Young Investigators from a cohort of young and particularly talented researchers. Two of these researchers are from AU. Wolf Eiserhardt from the Department of Bioscience and Jan Frahm from the Department of Mathematics will each receive a Villum Young Investigator grant of DKK 10 million.
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