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Research studies under unusual circumstances

It’s now been over two months since we all started working mostly from home. Everything is very different now, and I myself would have organized a conference last week. To still “meet” some of those who would have been here from all over the world, we had a Swedish fika via Zoom Friday afternoon. Everyone had promised to make really strong Swedish coffee to drink in front of the computer.

While some like the new working situation, others feel lonely. It is perhaps most difficult for those who are far from their home country, especially many doctoral students. Therefore it is important for us supervisors to keep in close contact with our doctoral students, not only for the research to continue as well as possible, but perhaps primarily for the human contact.

The research studies that can go on more or less as usual are the ones that are mostly performed in front of a computer. It’s more difficult when experiments are required and worst of all if the planned experiments were intended to take place outside Sweden. Hopefully we can return to more normal research studies this fall.

PhD defences and licentiate seminars have since March 25th, when we had the first digital defence with the respondent on link from South Africa, been held on Zoom. We have so far managed about ten PhD defences and one licentiate seminar and have another 15 to look forward to before the summer break begins. It has overall worked out very well and I see ahead that we, post-corona, will make sure to broadcast our events – we can then certainly expect a larger and more international audience. But clearly it will be nice when we can celebrate the new doctors IRL as well.

I will take the opportunity to give an update of the responsible persons for our doctoral programmes, DAs:

  • Luca Urciuoli new DA for Industrial Economics and Management
  • Stefan Hrastinski new DA for Education and Communication Studies
  • Lyuba Belova new DA for Education and Communication Studies

Find all DAs at ITM here

/ Malin Selleby, Director of Third Cycle Education at ITM