Newsmail #94, 2024-05-17

Dear all,

This week we have seen some new activities on campus. Currently about 30 students are camping on the main KTH courtyard in protest against the war in Gaza. We discussed this situation in the faculty on Wednesday. I encourage all to read the info on the KTH intranet to understand the situation and the official KTH position in the matter. With that said, and based on a risk that the protests might attract other potential trouble, KTH has decided to increase the safety awareness a bit. Some buildings now require access cards for example. Our main concern is the safety for our staff and students, and we need to ensure that students now have a chance to finish the semester, so anything that hinders us from doing our daily work needs to be reported to the security office (call 7700).

On Tuesday I met several colleagues at the “Storträff”, the annual meetup for teaching staff. It’s a nice event where we get updates on everything that is happening in our education, from AI to experimental focus to competence development. On Monday I joined the new planning seminar at MMK where four PhD students presented their plans and processes, either as start-up plans of mid-term plans. It was fascinating to see the well-prepared presentations, and I realized that with the brilliant PhD students we have, even I was able to understand and follow something of their research ideas, ambitions and challenges even after a brief presentation. I hope that this activity evolves into an annual activity that involves all PhD students and supervisors at MMK.

This week we also had our annual ITM competition between heads of departments (prefekts) and the business controllers (VhC). This year’s competition was table tennis. I am very proud to say that MMK showed the other departments how things are supposed to be.

Next week I look forward to see the presentations and demonstrations of our BSc thesis projects.

Best,

Martin