The Dean's Corner
Read the latest developments on the Open Campus from the Dean himself!
Open Campus: The Heart of Circle U. and a Vision for European Higher Education
Programme Development
The Open Campus offers a wide range of learning opportunities in various formats—online, offline, and blended—that students at Circle U. universities can access. These opportunities include:
- Joint master's and PhD programs
- Bachelor's modules on sustainability
- Short-term, blended learning opportunities like summer schools, hackathons, and challenges
- Open online courses, conversations and seminars
Our Objectives :
By establishing the Open Campus, Circle U. aims to:
- Develop a joint educational portfolio, enabling students to study at multiple institutions simultaneously.
- Serve as a one-stop shop for students, academics, and administrative staff, consolidating and simplifying access to information about educational opportunities across the alliance.
- Broaden and personalise student mobility options, including short-term mobility and opportunities for internationalisation at home.
- Streamline administrative coordination across knowledge hubs and partner universities.
- Support the development of educational content both within and beyond Circle U.’s priority areas.
- Provide tailored, step-by-step guidance to educators, fostering the creation of new offerings and expanding opportunities for collaboration and innovation.
Guidance and Validation
The Open Campus is responsible for advising on Circle U.'s educational formats and approving bottom-up initiatives to receive the Circle U. label. Chairs within the Open Campus are expected to actively contribute to shaping its profile and diverse educational offerings.
Meet the team
Dean & Vice-Dean
Prof. Eivind Engebretsen
- Dean
- University of Oslo
Prof. Eivind Engebretsen
- Dean
- University of Oslo
Prof. Engebretsen serves as the inaugural Dean of the Circle U. Open Campus with the overall responsibility for Circle U.’s educational programme.
As a professor of interdisciplinary health science at the University of Oslo (UiO), he has spearheaded the Sustainable Health Unit (SUSTAINIT) and the Centre for Sustainable Healthcare Education (SHE), the latter designated a Centre of Excellence in 2020, funded by the Norwegian government. From 2019-2022, he served as the elected Vice Dean of Education at the Faculty of Medicine, UiO.
As a scholar in medical humanities, he has collaborated with the French-Bulgarian philosopher Julia Kristeva to develop novel “translational” approaches to the field, challenging traditional boundaries between cultural, economic, biological, and ecological systems. This novel approach has gained international recognition, influencing researchers worldwide and resulting in a report on culture and health, commissioned by the World Health Organization.
As a Centre for Advanced Study fellow, Engebretsen has conducted pioneering research into the social epistemology of medicine, understood as the study of how medical knowledge is produced, legitimized, negotiated, documented, and exchanged throughout the global social fabric. His latest book, Rethinking Evidence in the Time of Pandemics (Cambridge University Press, 2022), co-authored with Mona Baker introduces a narrative model for understanding how medical knowledge is disseminated and interpreted by various constituencies during health crises, including pandemics. With Baker, he pioneered the creation of the SHE Corpus, a large suite of freely accessible electronic corpora, accompanied by open access visualization tools to support a corpus-assisted datathon model for student-led, empirically informed debate of key health concepts. In his previous role as a Circle U. Chair for Global Health, he implemented this method in education, which led to the development of the master’s course Politics of Sustainability in Public Health, now open to all Circle U. students.
Profile page and contact details
Faculty of Medicine
University of Oslo
Prof. Alessandro Balestrino
- Vice-Dean
- University of Pisa
Prof. Alessandro Balestrino
- Vice-Dean
- University of Pisa
Alessandro Balestrino is professor of Public Economics at the Department of Political Science, University of Pisa. He teaches and does research on such issues as public expenditure, especially the Welfare State, tax policy, especially the taxation of families, and the economic concept of well-being.
Profile page and contact details
Department of Political Science
University of Pisa
Academic Chairs
Dr. Lisbeth M. Brevik
- Academic Chair
- University of Oslo
Dr. Lisbeth M. Brevik
- Academic Chair
- University of Oslo
Dr. Lisbeth M. Brevik is an award-winning teacher educator and researcher. As Professor of English didactics at the University of Oslo, her research addresses questions about languages and higher education. She is the principal investigator of national and international projects, and is the author of articles, chapters and anthologies.
Profile page and contact details
Faculty of Educational Sciences
University of Oslo
Prof. Dr. Hannes Grandits
- Academic Chair
- Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Prof. Dr. Hannes Grandits
- Academic Chair
- Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Hannes Grandits is professor of Southeast European history at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin where he teaches the history of Southeast and Central Europe, with a special interest also in European com-parative and global perspectives.
Among other things, he is the author of the recently published mono-graph The End of Ottoman Rule in Bosnia (Routledge 2021), the co-editor, with K. Clewing, of Staat-lichkeit und Politik in Sudosteuropa nach 1800 (De Gruyter Oldenbourg 2024), and one of the co-authors of Phantomgrenzen im ostlichen Europa (Wallstein 2015). He is also – with Heike Wieters – in charge of the international study program “Joint Master European History.”
Profile page and contact details
hannes.grandits@hu-berlin.de
Faculty of Philosophy
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Dr. Marko Jovanović
- Academic Chair
- University of Belgrade
Dr. Marko Jovanović
- Academic Chair
- University of Belgrade
Marko Jovanović is an Associate Professor at the University of Belgrade, Faculty of Law, where he teaches International Trade Law, Arbitration and ADR, FDI Law and EU Private International Law. He obtained his PhD degree in 2014 at the University of Belgrade, Faculty of Law, with honors. Apart from his academic activities, Marko regularly sits as arbitrator in international commercial disputes, he occupies the position of vice-president of the Serbian Domain Name Dispute Resolution Institution, and he served as delegate to the UN Commission on International Trade Law on several occasions. He is a member of several professional business law associations both in Serbia and abroad. He is the academic chair in Circle U Open Campus on behalf of the University of Belgrade.
Profile page and contact details
marko.jovanovic@ius.bg.ac.rs
Department of Civil Law
University of Belgrade
Assoc. Prof. Sophie Maisonneuve
- Academic Chair
- Université Paris Cité
Assoc. Prof. Sophie Maisonneuve
- Academic Chair
- Université Paris Cité
I am Assistant Professor in Sociology at Université Paris Cité. My research interests lay in the socio-political, economic and technological issues involved in the process of making audiovisual collections part of a local, national or transnational heritage, with an emphasis on representation and participation. I teach cultural policies and the sociology of culture, exploring its role as a tool for emancipation. As the international coordinator at our Institute, I am dedicated to developing innovative projects that broaden students' global perspectives and raise their awareness of contemporary societal issues through various tools of internationalization at home.
Profile page and contact details
Associate Professor in Sociology
Faculté Société et Humanités
Université Paris Cité
Dr. Gabriel Reedy
- Academic chair
- King's College London
Dr. Gabriel Reedy
- Academic chair
- King's College London
Dr. Gabriel Reedy is programme director for the Masters in Clinical Education programme at King’s. His research focuses on how healthcare professionals, scientists, clinicians, and emergency responders learn, and in turn, how to support and train them more effectively. In particular, he studies how simulated environments can be used to help individuals learn and develop.
Profile page and contact details
Faculty of Life Sciences & Medicine
King's College London
Prof. Anne-Lise Sibony
- Academic chair
- UCLouvain
Prof. Anne-Lise Sibony
- Academic chair
- UCLouvain
Anne-Lise Sibony is a professor of European Law at the UCLouvain (Louvain-La-Neuve, Belgium). Her scholarship spans several areas of European law: competition law, internal market, and consumer law. Anne-Lise’s main research interest is how law incorporates insights from other social sciences (eco-nomics, behavioural science). Currently, she focuses on EU consumer protection and EU behavioural lawmaking.
Anne-Lise is from Paris, where she read economics (Paris I) and law (Paris II). She is an alumna from École Normale Supérieure (Paris) and the London School of Economics (London), where studied Regulation. She has been a guest professor at Paris II and KULeuven.
Profile page and contact details
Faculty of Law, UCLouvain
anne-lise.sibony@uclouvain.be
Professor Sam Smidt
- Academic Chair
- King's College London
Professor Sam Smidt
- Academic Chair
- King's College London
Sam is Academic Director of King’s Academy which is the education development team at King’s College London. She joined King’s in 2022 after nearly seven years in a similar role at UCL. Before that she was at the Open University for many years in the Faculty of Science and the office of the PVC Learning and Teaching.
Sam is a physicist by background and has many years’ experience of capacity building work in the field of online and distance learning and has worked on projects and consultancies in Central Asia, Russia and Bangladesh. She is particularly interested in programme design and supporting academics to consider a whole programme approach to learning design.
She has designed and developed MOOCs on the FutureLearn platform and developed a number of short courses for staff and students on UCL’s externally facing Moodle platform eXtend. Sam is a principal fellow of the HEA and is a member of AdvanceHE’s Fellowship and Accreditation Expert Advisory Group.
Profile page and contact details
Academic Director, King’s Academy
King's College London
Dr. Mira Vogel
- Academic Chair
- King's College London
Dr. Mira Vogel
- Academic Chair
- King's College London
I am involved in embedding education for sustainability into curricula across King’s. Towards this, I enable educators to come together in different ways and think through how to equip students with the knowledge, competencies, and willingness to take action on nexus sustainability problems. Relatedly, I am interested in different dimensions of inclusive educational practice, focusing on hidden curriculum, equitable group work, and discussing sensitive topics across difference. I also enable (particularly) colleagues on education career pathways to carry out educational scholarship and be recognised for that.
Profile page and contact details
Senior Lecturer in Education
King's College London
Prof. Dr. Heike Wieters
- Academic Chair
- Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Prof. Dr. Heike Wieters
- Academic Chair
- Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Heike Wieters has been Junior Professor of Historical European Studies at the Institute of History at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin since October 2019. Together with Hannes Grandits, she coordinates the Master of European History and won the Humboldt Award for Good Teaching in 2023 (also together with H. Grandits). The internationalization of teaching and research is a particular concern of hers.
Her research focuses on the contemporary history of European integration, global welfare (state) history – especially pension provision in Europe – and on the history of transnational relations and interactions between state and private actors in business and society.
Profile page and contact details
Department of History
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
