Newsmail #3, 2021-09-10

Dear all,

Today we’ll celebrate Staffan Qvarnström with a proper Barbecue outside the labhall. I will come back to this later with some history, but for now I want to encourage everyone to use this opportunity to meet, socialize, eat and drink nice – and to keep social distance at the same time.

This week the management group participated in a workshop to analyze our future needs for office spaces. We have been at two study visits this and last week, at two offices in the Stockholm area, to get inspired and to see new possibilities of using our house(s) in the future. One of my main take-aways from these visits is the realization that there are so many more work-modes than I myself have considered, as well as new technical solutions for meetings and on-site collaboration. At some point, I hope we can see these solutions also at MMK.

This week we have also started removing equipment that relates to the closing of the internal combustion engines unit. In a first round, a moving company has removed quite a lot of equipment from the basement, that is now being sent for recycling. The next step in this process will be to move activities from other parts of the building into the combustion lab, which will require temporary storage in the basement. We will likely see quite a lot of moving stuff around in our building this fall.

Today we have launched a steering group for our prototyping and workshop activities. This group is responsible for organizing the workshop and prototyping activities, identifying needs for recruitment for our labs, investments in new equipment, uses of facilities etc. Our lab manager is Anton Boström, and this steering group is to be used as a kind of board for us that will make decisions regarding the above. The board/steering group consists of Erika Gilbertsson, Stefan Björklund, Björn Möller and Stefan Ståhlgren – so please ask these individuals regarding what’s happening in this area. Now that Staffan also retires, as Tomas just did, we have needs and openings for new recruitments and it’s important to define what these needs will be in the future.

Best,

Martin