New Director of leading research environment at SDU
Jes Søgaard will take charge of the interdisciplinary research centre CPop, which addresses major societal challenges within demography and ageing.
On 1 March 2020, Jes Søgaard will take up the position of Director for the Interdisciplinary Centre on Population Dynamics (CPop), which is a world leader in the fields of demography, ageing and public health research.
Jes Søgaard has enormous knowledge of the Danish health care system and comes from a position as Professor of health economics at SDU.
His CV also includes four years as chief economist and head of section for the Danish Cancer Society, 15 years as Director of the then Danish Institute for Health Services Research and several research positions at e.g. SDU, Aarhus University and Linköping University.
What should society do?
Interdisciplinarity and application-oriented research have been at the fore throughout his career and Jes Søgaard will also be bringing this into play when taking up the position of Director.
- CPop is a strong research environment that focuses on the dynamic and mortality of the population. We know that we are getting older and older, and this is a positive development, but also a challenge. My ambition is for us to take the research a step further and look at the kind of life we are given, and how we can organise our society as the number of elderly people continues to increase, Jes Søgaard says and elaborates:
- It is therefore obvious to involve more researchers who, e.g. have knowledge of assistive technologies, pension systems, the healthcare system and family structures etc.
An important societal challenge
CPop has approx. 60 employees and is organisationally a part of the Faculty of Business and Social Sciences, where Dean of the faculty Jens Ringsmose looks forward to getting Jes Søgaard on the team.
- With Jes Søgaard, we are getting a very experienced and visionary Director for CPop. He has in-depth knowledge of the area of health and is very concerned about research being relevant and creating value for the outside world.
- The prospect of demographic change is a very important societal challenge that CPop can contribute to solving, and I am sure that Jes is the right person to further develop and put the centre on the agenda – nationally and internationally, Jens Ringsmose says.
About CPop
- CPop is a cross-faculty initiative at SDU, which researches into the causes and consequences of the demographic changes that most societies face as a result of ageing populations.
- The Centre was evaluated as the world’s leading research programme for biological and biomedical demographic studies of ageing in 2017.
- The research field has since been expanded and top researchers from a variety of disciplines, including demography, public health, biology, mathematics, economics, political science and the humanities are now affiliated with the Centre.
About Jes Søgaard
Jes Søgaard is Professor WSR and has most recently been associated with the Danish Centre for Health Economics (DaCHE) and the Department of Clinical Research at SDU. His research covers health service, health economics and health policy, and he has many years of management experience both in- and outside of the research landscape.