The Charité has decided on a new dean. From the end of the year, Joachim Spranger will head the faculty, making him head of research and teaching at Europe’s largest university clinic. Spranger is a professor of endocrinology and a diabetes specialist.
As an element of scientific autonomy, the faculty council elects the dean. There, Spranger prevailed against an external applicant. As Vice Dean for Studies and Teaching, Spranger has been a member of the faculty management for some time. As reported, the incumbent dean, the 68-year-old physiologist Axel Pries, will resign at the end of 2022.
As head of the faculty, i.e. the scientific operation of the large hospital, the dean is formally responsible for 2000 researchers and more than 8000 students. A total of almost 20,000 employees work at the Charité locations in Mitte, Wedding, Steglitz and Buch.
Spranger came to the Charité in 2008 and initially worked as a professor of diabetology. On Tuesday, Spranger announced that he was working on a future science strategy: “It will require considerable effort to coordinate interprofessional teaching formats between the various courses and training occupations at the Charité.”
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The dean is a member of the six-member Charité board, which in turn is headed by the pharmacologist Heyo Kroemer. Kroemer said that the university clinic intends to “further advance the cooperation of the Charité at national and international level” with Spranger.
In the Vivantes clinics, which are also state-owned, a decision will soon be made on two top positions. Vivantes CFO Eibo Krahmer will retire after the summer and a successor will be sought for him. Vivantes CEO Johannes Danckert, on the other hand, is currently in office “on an interim basis”. He should soon be fully confirmed in his post by the hospital chain’s supervisory board.
Charité and Vivantes-Kliniken care for 45 percent of all Berlin hospital patients and should cooperate more closely at the request of the Senate. The current Senator for Science Ulrike Gote (Greens), who is also a member of the Vivantes control committee, chairs the Charité Supervisory Board.
