Danubius University Deans Kicked Off Their Terms!

The public competition aimed at selecting the deans for the five faculties within “Danubius” University of Galați came to an end and the positions were approved by the institution’s Senate.

Thus, starting with October, at the head of the Law Faculty we meet Associate Professor Ana Alina Ionescu Dumitrache, at her second mandate as a dean. Asked which are the plans and strategies envisaged for the foreseeable future, she told us that “the configured strategy has the advantage of her six-year-experience in academic management” emphasizing the fact that “the power to adapt, through concrete solutions, to times unpredictability that burdens Romanian higher education, is essential”. At the same time, she confessed that she sees as important a process of adaptation of the entire department: “of the faculty, of the students, through permanent involvement in the academic community’s life, one that is not limited to being present (physically or online) in courses and seminars, but one that has to do with being active and proactive in partnership with the teachers”. In Associate Professor Ana Alina Ionescu Dumitrache’s opinion “it’s mandatory to change the approach when communicating with our department’s stakeholders, to intensify the part played by the employers when designing new study programs. Attracting as many professionals from the field of law: judges, prosecutors, lawyers, notaries, executors, liquidators etc. among the faculty in the two branches of the department, the one of Public Law and the one of Private Law, represents a priority also for this mandate”.

The new dean of the Economic Sciences Faculty is Associate Professor Călin Rangu. Having a broad experience in the financial-bank and strategic management sectors, he told us that “the Economic Sciences Faculty must become a department of first choice for students – future specialists in economy, in a society of knowledge and of global interconnection, based on professionalism, on aptitudes and competencies”. At the same time, he said that “the consumer’s voice, the educational services beneficiaries’ voice, will be heard to insure the existence of a frame of continuous upgrading of the quality of our services as to develop aptitudes and according competencies, in the fields of finance, business administration, accounting and economic informatics, cybernetics and statistics”. Regarding the activity of the Economic Sciences Faculty, “it will take into consideration the national and international contexts, the need to be proactive when talking about economic, digital and technological changes and it will identify solutions for a society prone to permanent change. The department has to change at the society’s pace, a permanent adaptation to the students’ and employers’ requirements to being efficient and performant in the research activity that must be connected to the business environment. Everything is linked to people who generate change to seal operational excellence, to facilitate innovation and to attract new developments and implications, with the support of a legal conformity”. According to the new dean, “the focus of the department will be centered on people, on their needs, be they students, partners or economic environment, faculty, non-academic staff, all of them being a community, with the major objective of raising the level of implication of this community in the resulting outcomes”.

Associate Professor Liviu Marinescu, Coordinator of the Center for Intercultural Programmes of “Danubius” University and the new dean of the Faculty of Communication and International Relations wanted to tell us that he always considered his department “to be a whole, a mechanism within which function or operates, at the same time, on multiple axes: decisional factors and faculty, auxiliary faculty/ teachers and students/ professors – associate professors - senior lecturers and teaching assistants/ Ph.D. coordinators – doctors and Ph.D. candidates with national, European and international involvement”. He underlined the idea that “the tradition and the notoriety of our department honor and oblige to maintaining and insuring a permanent growth of the academic performance, to a continuous improvement of the educational offer as also to making it compatible with the new exigencies of the national and European academic environment” and concluded with an optimistic message: “I believe that the Faculty of Communication and International Relations has the necessary potential and is able to make the expected qualitative leap. I am fully convinced that I will succeed into contributing, in a clear way, to the progress and success of the actions undertaken together”.

The School of ICT and Applied Sciences will be managed, for the second term in a row, by Senior Lecturer Professor Florin Postolache who underlined that “the School of ICT and Applied Sciences within “Danubius” University of Galați, through the major of Informatics, launches a new approach in the fields of information technology, computing and programming languages, entities that improve the way people work, interact, create, play and, of course, learn”. Moreover, he explained that “now we are at the moment when we start a new interesting phase by consolidating the IT&C competency pole, Informatics major being prepared to bring new contributions in the development of the South-East region of Romania”. What are his future plans as dean? “The School of ICT and Applied Sciences aims not only to build and consolidate the future through developing new fundamental technologies or through undergoing basic research that would promote the domain of informatics and its applications, but also to become a software incubator prone to bring stability and prosperity into the region, thus becoming a vibrant community, stimulating and creative in solving current and future issues”.

At the helm of the youngest Danubian department, the Faculty of Psychology and Biomedical Sciences, is to be found, in his quality of interim dean, Associate Professor Filip Stanciu, Vice-Rector for Academic Affairs and former dean of the Faculty of Communication and International Relations. He told us about the mission he undertakes together with the faculty he manages: “New in the Danubian academic landscape, the Faculty of Psychology and Biomedical Sciences aims at preparing specialists able to confront the negative effects of the World’s realities, with an accelerated dynamic, but, more than that, with unpredictable evolutions that tend to crush individualities or whole communities”. In addition, Associate Professor Filip Stanciu wanted to underline that “this new academic structure addresses to a certain Romanian region of development that highly requires this kind of professional services, beckoned by well-prepared specialists trained by the dedicated faculty in the department of Psychology and Biomedical Sciences. Only this way, together – teachers and students – we can bring to live the upcoming thought: <<The purpose of psychology is to provide us with a completely different idea over things that the one we know best>> (Paul Valéry)”.

Alina Petra Marinescu