Mikael on RAE: "The CBH School's research is world class"

The reception weeks for our new students are now over. Many students as well as employees have been deeply involved in welcoming the new students and they did a fantastic job. It is great to see the enthusiasm during these weeks and we now hope that the new students are inspired to take on the studies despite the fact that the continued corona restrictions make it difficult to have certain elements of the education on campus.

The last two weeks have also been intense starting-up for the autumn work. We had a meeting with the University Board, with the theme "Challenges in research", and a strategy day with CBH's management team, where we focused on challenges for the CBH School in the coming years. We are very successful and this is especially true when it comes to attracting external research grants where we see an increase of 5-10 percent this year. Our external financiers often demand that a certain amount of co-financing come from our basic funds, which makes it challenging to continue to grow with external grants. We will not say no to external grants, but we will need to look at how we distribute the KTH costs on the projects. In many cases, financiers bear direct costs but not indirect ones in the form of our “overhead” model.

We also discussed new faculty positions at CBH, and this year we will hold back on new positions as we have many ongoing recruitments. The background is that our ambition is to maintain the size of our faculty, and our basic resources are limited.

The RAE week is over and we have received quick feedback from the chairs of the various panels. Very briefly we can say that the CBH School's research is world class! When the reports are ready, we at the school will continue to work with the various recommendations that are given. We will present the contents of the reports at our staff meetings in November.

Micke