Newsmail #24, 2022-04-08

Dear all,

We have a new member of our community: Erik Rovanperä (KTH | Erik Rovanperä). Erik replaces Måns as our previous caretaker of our buildings. You will recognize Erik since he’s been at Service center a couple of years already.

This week, we have performed in total four audits: three safety inspections and one audit focused on chemicals and our environmental work. The safety inspections focused mainly on our lab facilities, both at the MMK building and the ITRL building. The inspector noted a few deviances (not our chairs though) that we must take care of before next inspection. All lab-related staff will share this responsibility, coordinated by Anton. The chemical auditor went around in MMK yesterday and interviewed random students to investigate if they were familiar with our procedures and if they had read the detailed rules regarding each used chemical. Also in this regard, we have some action we need to take, and we will try to clarify the various responsibilities for this action so that we can proceed with our important experimental work.

Our work on the RAE process, action plans and roadmaps is now on full speed. We have parallel developments of roadmaps for our units and various research fields, the education roadmap is already well structured and relates to the “future of our education” (KTH:s plan for 2027). On May 13 we’ll sync the various roadmaps into a joint MMK development plan, which we will present on June 8. On June 15-16, we’ll sync the MMK development plan with the other departments at ITM, and in August we’ll deliver our “plan for the future” to KTH management. In this plan, I expect us to have sorted out our thoughts on which research areas we’ll move further into, how we’ll collaborate in multidisciplinary projects in the future, how our educational portfolio will be etc.

I also want to share the ITRL Annual Report 2021 which was published today so that you can see what’s happening at ITRL.

Now I wish all a nice weekend,

Martin