UniPID appoints a new director

The UniPID board has appointed Eva Nilsson as the new director starting from January 2023. Nilsson has a diverse background in academia, NGOs and the public sector on issues related to the Global South.

UniPID starts the new year with some winds of change, as Eva Nilsson joins the coordination team of the network. The new director is excited to take up the work to support Finnish higher education institutions in bringing global responsibility and Global South perspectives into their education, research, and societal impact activities.

“UniPID’s mission to promote global partnerships for sustainable development is more urgent than ever. We need genuinely global approaches and co-learning in today’s polarized world to address pressing and complex sustainability crises. Scholars from the Global North and South hold significant power to critically analyse, innovate solutions and to co-create knowledge together”, Nilsson believes.

Before joining UniPID, Nilsson did doctoral studies at Hanken School of Economics. In her doctoral dissertation, she researched the positioning of Global South states toward Western businesses’ corporate responsibility activities in Tanzania and the United Nations. Previously, Nilsson has worked as an advisor and volunteered in civil society organizations in Finland, Belgium, and Tanzania, and worked as a programme officer for the Finnish Ministry for Foreign Affairs. She holds master’s degrees in World Politics from the University of Helsinki and African Politics from SOAS, University of London.

With UniPID’s member universities, Nilsson wants to continue the important work to provide students with interesting courses on sustainable development pathways and to promote research partnerships with peers from the Global South. She also wants to ensure that the UniPID network flourishes and survives pressures within Finnish higher education to cut costs.

“I’m happy to be able to work with such a broad range of Finnish universities and in a multi-disciplinary environment. I will be leading UniPID’s work on policy dialogue and societal impact and based on my previous work experience across sectors, I hope to bring new ideas to the network on how to increase the impacts of research”, she adds.

The coordination unit warmly welcomes Eva Nilsson and is eager to work together in promoting global responsibility within Finnish academic institutions.

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Photo credits: Stephen Leonardi, 2023, on Unsplash.