Newsmail #42, 2022-11-29

Dear all,

Last week I joined a three-day course in Brussels for EU-projects, with a lot of focus on how the EU grant system works, all different instruments and mechanisms. The course was arranged by the Stockholm Trio Brussels office, the office for KTH, Karolinska Institute and Stockholm University. We visited the EU parliament, the Ghent University and the Stockholm Trio office. I think we have a lot of under-utilized opportunities in relation to EU funding, and, we need to start early, with new young faculty, to get into the right networks and activities.

The week before, I joined an ITM support staff meeting, a two day meeting with all admin staff at ITM, to discuss relations between faculty and support staff, in particular in relation to the ongoing reorganization of the overall KTH support organization. It’s a very challenging task for support staff to understand and become familiar with all of our activities, we have many activities, in a wide range of areas. I also think that we often do not utilize enough the expertise we can find among the staff.

Last week was also dedicated to budget work. We have big challenges ahead with increasing costs and decreased external funding. I’ll come back to this later.

Yesterday I joined the “stormöte”, the large meeting at KTH with all teaching staff, to discuss pedagogical development. I was very happy to see so many MMK-teachers there.

Best,

Martin