Mikael on future challenges for CBH

At the end of last week, KTH's strategic council had a two-day seminar. We, the Heads of KTH’s five schools, made a joint presentation about the future challenges we see.

KTH's research is very successful, which can be seen in the fact that we receive large external grants. Unfortunately, few of our benefactors want to be involved and contribute to the overhead costs that are linked to the fact that we are a university with the tasks of education, research and collaboration. Through proactive work with theme areas that involve more than one school, we would have a greater opportunity to influence the research sponsors. Examples of interdisciplinary, multi- and multidisciplinary research and education areas could be:

• Sustainable energy
• Durable materials
• Sustainable financial markets
• The Baltic Sea
• Sustainable lifestyle, health and food

In first and second cycle education, we addressed challenges in:

• Lifelong learning and how do we achieve our goals?
• Digital development
• Meeting places for students, faculty and industry

There is today a great focus on first and second cycle education, which is natural for a university, but postgraduate education is also important. Here we see that we need to maintain the possibility of training a large number of doctoral students, but many government financiers do not provide four-year grants that can ensure full cost coverage for the employment of a doctoral student. The number of scholarships has also decreased in recent years, when requirements for additional scholarships financed by private funds have been introduced. We can increase the number of externally employed doctoral students in collaboration with strategic partners and other contacts, work to receive donations that can be used for additional scholarships and KTH's management should have a dialogue with the ministry and grantors in order to influence them to cover all four years.

Finally, we addressed the need for operational support and cost allocation. Investigations have been started there within premises costs, resource distribution and digital support tools. These investigations then need to be concretized in the operations.

Mikael