Professor Trond Petersen gets an honorary doctorate from UiB
«The efforts of professor Trond Petersen has been really important in developing research collaboration and student exchange between Norwegian universities and the University of Berkeley,» says Jan Erik Askildsen, dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences.
Main content
«From his base in the US, Trond Petersen has made an enormous effort for internationalization og Norwegain academia in the 2000's,» says UiB professor and head of the Department of Sociology, Kristoffer Vogt, who was one of the people that nominated Petersen.
Har received numerous awards
Trond Petersen has been a central contributor to research on social inequality and discrimination in the workplace, and in organizations for several decades, particularly related to family and gender. Petersen moved to the United States to pursue a doctoral degree in sociology at the University of Wisconsin in 1982, after finishing his undergraduate studies at the University of Oslo.
He has taught at institutions such as Harvard University and the University of Oslo and has held his primary position at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is currently a professor, and until recently served as the head of the sociology department at UC Berkeley.
Trond Petersen has received numerous awards for his lectures in the US and has done extensive research, with several papers published in the world's highest-ranked sociology journals.
Petersen and Geir Høgsnes at UiO were among the first to use population data to analyze the relationships between wage inequality, gender, job level, and job category in the USA and Norway. They demonstrated early what has since become more widely known: that wage disparities in Norway are primarily due to men and women occupying (or gaining access to) different positions in the labor market.
Important efforts
«The efforts of professor Trond Petersen has been really important in developing research collaboration and student exchange between Norwegian universities and the University of Berkeley. This is something that numerous colleagues and students at UiB and the Faculty of Social Sciences have benefited greatly from,» says Jan Erik Askildsen, dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences.
He explains that through the establishment of the Peder Sather Centre for Advanced Study, Trond Petersen has been an important figure in securing funding for research projects between Norwegian and American colleagues, which has in turn laid the foundation for long-term collaborations. For his outstanding work, benefiting science and Norwegian academia in particular, Petersen was knighted in 2014 by the Royal Norwegian Order of Merit, first class.
«Trond has also helped make it possible for many researchers from our faculty to spend both shorter and longer research visits at Berkeley. We are very pleased to appoint Trond Petersen as an honorary doctor at the University of Bergen, both on academic grounds and for contributing to creating a framework for collaboration between our two institutions,» Jan Erik Askildsen says.
Negotiated important exchange programme's
«Trond Petersen's scholarly works have had a significant influence on public discourse and policy formation in a politicized research area where precise knowledge is a prerequisite for designing effective political solutions with broad support,» Kristoffer Vogt says.
Through the student exchange agreements Petersen has negotiated with UC Berkeley, a large number of Norwegian students have had the opportunity to study one or more semesters at Berkeley. A joint exchange agreement between UC Berkeley and six Norwegian universities from 2007 allowed many more Norwegian students to take courses at UC Berkeley at greatly reduced tuition fees, contrasting with the limited exchange programmes that had existed before that time.
«This is the largest exchange programme between Norway and any foreign university, and it has been highly successful. Only from UiB, nearly 200 students have participated in this programme during the last decade,» Vogt says.
