Mikael on school dialogue two

Last week, we had CBH school dialogue two. In the dialogue between KTH's management and CBH’s school management, a follow-up is made of the current year's assignments and preparation for next year's budget and plan of operation. The President praised CBH on all counts and here is only a brief summary of the situation. The finances are in balance in terms of the entire school and we see an increase in external funding in 2020. We had a good gender balance within the newly recruited faculty this year. To date, five assistant professors and one professor have been hired in 2020, of which three are women and three are men. A senior lecturer (male) has moved to CBH from another of KTH's schools.

The operational assignment for 2020 includes start-up grants in sustainable development: Four faculty positions have been approved for start-up grants by the Vice-Chancellor for Sustainable Development:

• Associate Professor of Analytical Chemistry
• Professor of processes for fiber-based materials from forest raw materials
• Senior lecturer in mammalian cell-based bioprocess technology
• Assistant senior lecturer in chemical engineering with a focus on applied electrochemistry (under evaluation)

From an internationalization perspective, it can be mentioned that four of the newly hired assistant professors have a doctorate from another university outside Sweden.

Much of the dialogue was devoted to CBH's challenges over the next three to five years. We mentioned our campus in Solna (and SciLifeLab) and Flemingsberg. In Solna, it is very crowded and further expansion will require a strategic discussion about whether KTH will expand the premises to the next building. In Flemingsberg, the organization works well, but the local cost is too high. One solution is to attract more groups from other parts of KTH to Flemingsberg and the other is currently to leave Flemingsberg. In that case, we will do it in an orderly manner and right now the department heads at MTH are conducting risk analyzes together with the head of department. Nothing will happen in the near future, but we need to raise the issue with KTH's management.

It is becoming increasingly clear that, even in the spring of 2021, we will have to work and teach through a combination of on location and online presence, due to the Covid-19 pandemic. For KTH, an average of 2,600 meetings / lectures are held at Zoom every working day, and an average of 21,000 people use KTH's Zoom solution per day. On Canvas, a total of 610,000 page views are made per day on average, which corresponds to a 50% increase compared to the previous year.

This year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A. Doudna. They have discovered one of the sharpest tools in genetic engineering: the CRISPR / Cas9 genetic scissors.

Mikael