Professional activities

Building upon his experience as a Research Fellow and six years of post-doctoral study, Dr Gregory Offer was successfully appointed to a lectureship at Imperial College London in 2013. Although his application was primarily focused on his research achievements in the field of electrochemical devices, Dr Offer also included evidence of his educational achievements by providing a description of his teaching and learning activities.

Dr Offer’s application included details of his teaching and student supervision responsibilities to date. It also provided a description of a multi-disciplinary student project that he co-established and had been co-leading for seven years. Imperial Racing Green (IRG) is a curricular project that challenges students to “design, build and race zero emission or low carbon racing cars”, involving around 100 undergraduates each year from across the School of Engineering.

Within his promotion case, Dr Offer described his role in both initiating and leading this innovative teaching project, including “helping manage the day-to-day running of the project with the students, setting up effective student and academic management structures to engage academics from multiple departments in the faculty of engineering, obtaining funding from both internal and external sources, and supervising a number of students in both the technical and management aspects of their projects”. Following his appointment, Dr Offer noted the important role played by IRG in raising his profile within the department and helping to distinguish his appointment case.

Associate Professor Hanne Jarmer was appointed to Head of the Department of Systems Biology at DTU in 2014.  She brought a research background in advanced bioinformatics and a history of systemic educational reform and leadership in teaching and learning at both departmental and institutional levels. 

Within her case for appointment to Department Head, Dr Jarmer listed a number of her professional activities in teaching and learning, including her teaching responsibilities and activities as Head of Education for her department.  However, she acknowledged that the educational activity likely to have had the most profoundly positive impact on her promotion case was her leadership role in “bringing the coursera [online learning] platform to DTU – I went above the department.  I wore the DTU hat rather than only the Systems Biology hat.  It was something that benefitted the whole university. I contacted the coursera founders and argued for the value of DTU on the platform and they invited us in”.  Dr Jarmer’s case listed her role in establishing the university’s coursera agreement, making way for the first coursera course in Scandinavia, as well as in supporting its delivery and joining the coursera–DTU steering committee.