Text and photo by David Graff, AAU Communication & Public Affairs

It is not the result of long-term career planning that Mogens Hinge can call himself Professor of Materials Science and Engineering in the Department of Materials and Production, specializing in polymers and colloids, as of 1 November.     

"I don't elbow my way to one thing or another, but I’ve made some choices along the way and rolled with the consequences. Now I'm sitting here, but I could just as well have ended up as a carpenter, and I probably would have been very happy about that too," he says.

Incompatible with the school system

Mogens Hinge has understood choice and consequences as some of life's cogs from primary school onwards; it is a prism through which he sees his life.

"I was always told that I was a bit stupid, lazy and incompatible with the primary school system, so I became an apprentice baker. That was in 1987. But one Thursday evening, week 27 in 1995, my lungs completely shut down. I had been struck by baker’s asthma and could no longer handle the wheat flour dust in the bakery air. Wheat flour asthma is really bad if you are going to be a baker." 

So, after working as a baker on the West Coast of Denmark, in London and in Aalborg, the choice of a baking career turned out to have rather drastic consequences. 

"I had to completely switch tracks. There was no choice. I just couldn't go on."

Since Mogens Hinge had previously been a nurse in the military, it seemed obvious for him to swap the bakery life for a future as a nurse. So with that goal, he began upper secondary education.

"But then my lovely, bubbly chemistry teacher, we just called her Crazy Chemistry Kirsten, said: "This won't work! You shouldn’t be a nurse, you have to go to university!" I followed her advice and started biotech, knowing that I wasn’t at all smart and skilled enough for it. But I thought I could learn something about cells and such things that I could use when I got kicked out of university and switched to nursing," Mogens Hinge remembers. 

Work ethic, activity and curiosity

In academia, Mogens Hinge met a new and much more fortunate version of the connection between choices and consequences. Because even though he himself did not expect to manage more than a semester or two, the choice paid off. He has no doubt about what made the difference for him:

"What I came in with, and what many of my fellow students didn’t have, was a strong work ethic. This made all the difference for me. From bakery work, I was used to things having to be delivered and delivered on time! It wasn’t up for discussion. Regardless of whether you had only slept two hours on a sack of flour down in the warehouse."

The combination of a strong work ethic, curiosity and a desire to do difficult or impossible things has proven to be a catalyst for almost everything he does:

"I need to spend time and effort on something I can't do. This applies to my research, where I tend to jump into projects that are a little impossible and a little crazy. It's like what drives me is that it has to be impossible. The same goes for my spare time. I constantly need to have something in my hands and be learning something new."

Mogens Hinge can thus list a wide range of interests and skills that you do not always find in people with jobs that require a lot of resources and a lot of time. Among other things, he does acrobatics at an international level; is a trained acupuncturist; teaches blacksmithing and woodcarving; builds drawing robots, CNC milling machines and 3D printers; has worked with stone, wood, electronics and other "gizmos" in his own workshop; and is, in his own words, "quite skilled at crocheting".

"I think if I had been a boy today, I would probably have been medicated until I didn't do anything. I have no diagnoses, just a lot of energy. So I've tried many different things, and it's ended up as an advantage now, because the mix of the things I've done over time means that today I often think in terms of unconventional and strange solutions. And there may be a need for that." 

Aalborg-Aarhus round trip

Mogens Hinge met his wife in Aalborg – she is from Hasseris and today works in a kindergarten in Vodskov – and initially they settled in Northern Jutland. Mogens Hinge thus took his first academic steps at Aalborg University. 

"Quite early in my education, I got caught up in surface chemistry, and when I finished my PhD, I was certain that I should continue working with colloids and polymers. At the time, I was deeply interested in sludge which is a very complex composition of biological material, sand and fibres and such things that are constantly changing – like a kind of bubbly soup where a lot is constantly converting."

So Mogens Hinge continued on the same track, but in a different location, when he applied for and received funding to do a postdoc at Aarhus University. The city he is originally from. 

"In 2008, I started as a postdoc in Aarhus, and before the first semester was over, they asked me to stay and be the research manager for the RadiSurf project. I said yes to that, and the project ended up as a company of the same name that still exists. I then became an assistant professor, associate professor and was for a period the coordinator of the chemical engineering programme. That was when the Engineering College was established as an initiative in Aarhus. Then I started the research group PPE, i.e. Plastic & Polymer Engineering."

Mogens Hinge spent a total of 17 years at Aarhus University, and from start to finish, the desire to try something nearly impossible drove the work. Like getting a system to identify and sort plastic fractions so efficiently that precision and speed are not an obstacle to recycling.

An appetite for new and big challenges has also made Mogens Hinge drive north again from his home in Terndrup.

"There are exciting opportunities up here. For example, I see at least six research groups working with plastics across Energy, Materials and Production, Chemistry and Bioscience and BUILD. And I have also worked with obstetricians and gastrointestinal surgeons where there is a lot of polymer chemistry, so there is definitely also a point of contact with medical research at the Faculty of Medicine. It's exciting for someone like me with a somewhat complementary skill set that can be relevant in several places and in several ways."

Research isn’t everything

Research will take up a lot of Mogens Hinge's time, but there is still more to do outside of work.

"If you ask about my next life goal, I'm going to be a painter. I've been a craftsman, sportsman and an academic, but I've never been an artist. So I'm going to try that too. And then a year and a half ago, I became a grandfather to Felix, and I look forward to exploring all sorts of things with him – when he is no longer frightened by the noise in my workshop."

Translated by LeeAnn Iovanni, AAU Communication & Public Affairs.