Profile

Sanna Lassen is an Assistant Professor at the Centre for Educational Development at Aarhus University. She leads the research project EDULEAD, which focuses on educational leadership at universities. Over the past 20 years, she has been involved in management and leadership in various capacities. Among other roles, she has served as a project manager for municipal management development projects, provided guidance to management teams, and taught diploma programmes in Management. She holds a master’s in educational sociology and is particularly interested in theoretical organisational and leadership perspectives. Through her experiences in management, she has observed a frequently overlooked organisational role held by employees with additional responsibility for teaching and pedagogical development in collaboration with colleagues and management. This role was the focus of her PhD thesis, which has been turned into a book and has led to several presentations. In addition, Sanna is a member of the Scandinavian Luhmann Forum and often employs systems theory to understand organisations and leadership.

Job responsibilities

Sanna Lassen is a teacher who specialises in teaching techniques and perspectives for PhD students. She also conducts research in educational leadership and leads the research project EDULEAD. This project is based on the ‘Danish framework for advancing university pedagogy’ and focuses on professors and associate professors who have additional responsibilities for teaching and pedagogical development but are outside the managerial line. These individuals may have titles such as director of studies, programme leader and course coordinator. Based on her PhD, Sanna's research focuses on these individuals' unique educational leadership roles and highlights the importance of defining this role as distinct and important, as opposed to being part of "distributed leadership." Through the EDULEAD project, she explores how this understanding applies in a university context, specifically how these leaders can navigate the tension between person, role, and organisation, and how university management can support their success. Furthermore, Sanna has implemented her research through an educational management course that she leads, aimed at employees with this specific role, providing support for their practical development as leaders.