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An interesting period to come

Yesterday there was an award ceremony to thank our president Peter Gudmundson for his 9 years at the rudder of KTH. Labans Hage – the small area between Brinellvägen 8 and 10 – was renamed in Peter’s honour to Peters Hage, and a nice piece of art was installed reflecting Peter’s background as an elite ice-hockey player.

The first KTH Management group meeting with our new president Sigbritt Karlsson takes place on Monday afternoon. She has already announced that her ambition is to have more of strategic discussions at those meeting, and little less of just unilateral information flow. Information can be passed on more efficiently by other means, she says. The topic of discussion at this first meeting will be the “conditions and situation for young researchers”. And the corresponding background material is:

Early-career researchers need fewer burdens and more support and
Young scientists under pressure: what the data show

Another topic that our new president most likely will bring to the table is a new development plan for KTH from 2018 and onwards. For ITM, this topic will be one of the main points of discussion at the annual ITM leader’s conference which takes place January 11-12. The KTH and School development plans 2013-2016 were extended with one year due to the change of presidents. For ITM we made only minor changes to the previous plan except for a new section entitled Specific initiatives which covers a number of new strategic School initiatives which have resulted from, and been developed under, the ITM Academic Development Plan 2013‐2016. You find this plan under our intranet pages.

On Wednesday this week we had the last formal discussion with the former (by Monday) president, and this ended up in a signed ITM Activity contract (Verksamhetsuppdrag) for 2017. After some rather tough negotiations we managed to almost reach the targeted level for new initiatives (faculty positions) while preserving the funding for some “extraordinary initiatives” which we have negotiated during the year. Examples of those are cash funding for PMH and extra faculty funding during the build-up period at our Södertälje campus.

As we all have noticed, the winter is here and I hope for a cross country première during the weekend! Physical exercise in any form is good for us, so please check out the ITM Wellness activities and the ITM Calendar on our intranet.

/ Jan Wikander
Dean of School