There is for obvious reasons a lot of focus on sustainability. Within the Postgraduate education committee (Forskarutbildningsutskottet), consisting of the professors responsible for our six doctoral programmes and myself, an idea has emerged: to develop a course in sustainability for doctoral students. The intention is to do the course as collaborative effort between all our departments. I presented the idea at the Faculty Club and have since then been contacted by teachers interested in such a course. Shortly we’ll form a group to discuss how to proceed. If you are interested – please send me an email!

On the same theme – I hope that all supervisor and PhD students are aware of that they need to comment on the coupling between their own research and the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals in each individual study plan – tab 10 under C2.

As many of you already know, all managers at ITM are now taking part in a course – Leadership development from a gender perspective. Maybe you have been asked to go out on “Culture reconnaissance” (kulturspaning) in your own working environment? To work towards, and focus on gender equality, is also part of developing a sustainable future. So, please – go out and “kulturspana”!

/Malin Selleby, Director of Third Cycle Education at the ITM School

Last Wednesday and Thursday (on April 10-11) we had the annual ITM PhD student conference at Skogshem and Wijk on Lindingö. The theme this year was equality (JML) and sustainability. Alice Marshall gave an introduction to “one KTH” followed by several group exercises/discussions. In one of them we were all supposed to stand in different corners divided in how equal we think our working environment is on a scale between 1 and 10, 10 being perfect in terms of gender equality. The choice of “environment” could be the closest group or even the whole of KTH. It was interesting to see that we were spread out between 8-9 to 2-3.

Sara Linderson shortly presented the new platform, Industrial Transformation, a platform that will coordinate all KTH researchers that in different ways support the transformation to a sustainable CO₂-neutral industry. The manager of the platform is Monica Bellgran, KTH Södertälje.

In the evening, beforea very nice dinner, there was a poster session with the goal to bridge the gap between different research fields i.e. find a PhD student colleague in another area where there is some overlap of interest.

In the morning of the second day Ulf Sandström gave a lecture about the Vancouver Rules on Publishing. The rules discuss “Who Is an Author?” and the following four criteria must be fulfilled for any author:

1. Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work; AND
2. Drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content; AND
3. Final approval of the version to be published; AND
4. Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.

This is something for the students to discuss in their respective research environments and with their supervisors. It think that it is important not to be too interested in the ranking lists but to make sure that authorship and citations are treated in a correct way.

After a coffee break Hélène Hermansson gave a talk about sustainability and the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG:s) and asked the participants to think and discuss how these goals can connect to their own research, both in a positive and negative ways.

The SDG:s can be found here.

Thank you all lecturers, DAs and participants!