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President of Aalto University Ilkka Niemelä has appointed Professor Jani Romanoff as Vice Dean for Education for a five-year term from 1 August 2024 to 31 July 2029, a position he has held since 2021.

Romanoff is a highly accomplished teacher and educational developer, who is a professor of marine technology at the Department of Mechanical Engineering. He has also long been a driving force in various national and international engineering cooperation networks.

As Vice Dean for Education, Romanoff is responsible for the overall pedagogical planning, implementation and monitoring of the results of the school's Bachelor's and Master's programmes.  

"The best part of my job is finding systemic solutions that can spread as a positive change in our complex organisation. The more collaborative the solutions, the stronger the sense of achievement," says Romanoff.  

In the near future, the language reform and the tuition fee reform, for example, will bring challenges to the development of the university's teaching.  

"But in these, as in all things, there are also opportunities. We should be able to examine both sides of the coin, and even its edges. In the long term, the focus on learning in our activities is emerging as the overriding theme. It means investing in genuine on-time graduation by looking at the structure and content of our programmes, the support we are giving regarding study fluency, as well as internalising the concept of lifelong learning”, says Romanoff.  

In the coming term as Vice Dean for Education, Romanoff will also continue to work to support the well-being of teachers and students. The focus will be on a more even distribution of workloads and building a sense of community.