Newsmail #85, 2023-03-08

Dear all,

On Tuesday this week we met with the MMK Faculty, for our annual strategy-day, at an external conference venue. On the agenda was the establishment of “CE@ED”, Complex Systems at Engineering Design. Our Anna Pernestål is the newly appointed project manager for this establishment, an activity that now has been defined as a two year development project, with a steering group and a project team. The project launch coincided with the announcement from the KTH Rector that we have been given the permission to open up three new tenure track positions in this field, three assistant professorships, with the opportunity to be promoted to full professor. These positions will be announced next week.

Beside the above, we spent two hours on a training activity to promote gender equality, inclusiveness, and equal treatment, led by KTH Equality Office. We also discussed promoting the prototype centre and activities to promote communication and dissemination.

On Wednesday, I met with all the KTH department managers in a conference with the KTH rector and management, to discuss all the ongoing changes. I will come back to these discussions further on, with more details. The rector from our neighbouring university, the Swedish Defence University, gave a guest lecture on the role of Universities in times of conflict, a speech that was very interesting. The rector had travelled around in Ukraine last year and based his speech on those experiences. I hope to be able to come back to that as well.

Yesterday I was happy to see a number of ITM colleagues at the JML lunch seminar on Gender-based violence and proactive work.

Today I have seen colleagues having lunch outside, in the sun, a first for this year. Now it really feels like the spring is here.

With that, I want to wish everyone a nice weekend.

Best,

Martin