Wet and dry academic environments
Long before William de Neergaard was tasked with identifying tradeoffs at Novo Nordisk, he and a small group of dedicated researchers from six different DTU departments were searching for insights that could lead to the current partnership between DTU and Novo Nordisk. The group would work with Novo Nordisk to identify the company’s key challenges and help solve them.
“We agreed to approach it as a classic design process, where you go out and ask the target group what they need and go back and design” explains Lars Hvam, professor at DTU Construct and one of the initiators of the group together with Professor Niels Henrik Mortensen, postdoc Kristoffer Wernblad Sigsgaard, and Associate Professor Rasmus Frandsen.
The method led to extensive interviews with key people at Novo Nordisk and the involvement of 150 DTU researchers. Through workshops, both at DTU and Novo Nordisk, visions were formulated for where Novo Nordisk wants to be in five to ten years, and six research themes were formulated to be realized in 24 interdisciplinary PhD projects over five years.
“The interdisciplinary nature of the projects was important, because at Novo Nordisk the process that takes place in production is biological,” says Niels Henrik Mortensen and elaborates:
“If you for example have a mechanical engineering background, you often don’t understand the biology of the production process. That’s why you need different disciplines working together. Because if biology is not taken into account in production design, you risk using inappropriate materials.”
Therefore, the individual PhD students at Novo Nordisk are anchored in a ‘wet’ and a ‘dry’ academic environment, respectively, with a supervisor located in both places. The ‘wet’ covers the biotechnological, chemical, and health technology engineering areas anchored at the departments of DTU Bioengineering, DTU Chemistry, and DTU Health Tech, while the ‘dry’ covers the areas of construction, computer science and electronics anchored at the departments of DTU Construct, DTU Compute, and DTU Electro.
In the long term, Novo Nordisk wants the interdisciplinary approach to become even more firmly anchored in the research environments and programs at DTU, so students from the outset are prepared to communicate and collaborate with other professional groups than their own.
Fit for future
For William de Neergaard, the anchoring in two academic environments, DTU Construct and DTU Health Tech, and the partnership with a global company like Novo Nordisk has been instructive—especially because a fast-paced everyday with short deadlines must be combined with the need for research immersion.
“It’s a big challenge to make these things work together, but also super exciting. I already have a clear idea that the research has something relevant to contribute,” says William de Neergaard.
His supervisor at Novo Nordisk, Rebekka Pontoppidan Tuxen, shares his view.
“Research helps us predict and simulate to adapt to the future. We’ve been here for 100 years and definitely plan to be here for another 100, so we have to adapt our ways of working,” she says.
The aim of William de Neergaard’s research is to come up with a new production design concept that, with efficiency as a parameter, has pooled products according to the technological performance of each machine.
He predicts a solution that better integrates production into platforms and modules. However, a concept that solves all challenges is almost impossible to come up with.
“If one thing works optimally, it will always have a consequence for something else. The task here is to find a solution with the least possible consequences—and we’re well on our way,” says William de Neergaard.
The plan for the partnership is to hire four new PhD students from DTU this autumn. Next spring, another four will be hired to help the company achieve its vision for the future.
