First, I hope that all of you had relaxing vacations and that you now are full of energy and motivation, which is needed to drive ITM towards excellence in teaching, research and administration this semester. Myself, I had a great summer where I spent most of the time in Stockholm, being a tourist. Since I live on the country side (Åkersberga) it is quite interesting to come in to “the big city” as a tourist. Among many new experiences, I have found a charming coffee shop on Jakobergsgatan, Sempre with fantastic baristas that can make you marvelous cups of coffees (Note, two not named ITM employees with an Italian background has confirmed that my conclusion regarding the coffee quality is correct, Grazie!). Thus, in short I can summarize my vacation with the activities walks, enjoying good food and drinking fantastic coffee. Not so bad uh!

 As all of you know that the ITM school is hiring lots of new faculty at the moment, actually most among all schools at KTH. One reason is, of course, that we are expanding the ITM activities on the Södertälje Campus to include research besides the already ongoing teaching activities. Here, ITM plans to hire eight new faculty members. Recently, we could see a big smile from the Department Head Kristina Palm as she could hire her first new faculty. As a matter of fact, as you read this blog Jannicke Hauge has already begun her new job as an associate professor in production logistics. Thus, the historical event of building up research at Campus Södertälje will be started by Jannicke and we will see where it leads……..to be continued.

Hiring of faculty is taken place at the other five departments also. Björn Palm at the Departments of Energy Technology and Mauro Onori at the Department of Industrial Production are hiring 4 assistant professors each. Sofia Ritzén at the Department of Machine Design and Annika Borgenstam at the Department of Materials Science and Engineering are hiring one Associate Professor and two Assistant Professors each. Finally, Matti Kaulio at the Department of Industrial Technology and Management is hiring three Associate Professors and three Assistant Professors. Thus, me and the other faculty members in the ITM recruitment board will spend many hours this fall to interview the best candidates for each position, to ensure that we hire the person with the best qualifications for each position. I will talk more about the results of these interviews in my later blogs this fall.

Finally, I must share some happy news with you since my last blog. When Karin Steneholm successfully defended her doctor degree on June 10, I celebrated that I had participated in graduating my 50^th student with a PhD degree. This would not have been possible without the help of my excellent colleagues as well as without motivated and hard-working students. Therefore, I feel happy and grateful for having these opportunities and I hope to be able to continue to supervise new students in the future.

/Pär Jönsson, Vice Dean

Safety inspections at ITM

As we have talked about earlier in this blog, the working environment for the personnel and the student’s is an important part of ITM’s work. As part of our systematic work focusing on the working environment, we have completed the safety inspections at each department under the lead of each department head and with the support of Sofia Granberg at Dean’s Office. From the department, the local health and safety representative as well as people responsible for chemicals, fire protections and laboratories participated. In addition, Ulf Götbrant participated, he is an engineer from the company Avonova, who are experts in issues related to the working environment especially in laboratories. After each inspection a report is written which states weak parts that need to be corrected in order to improve the environment as which environmental law in Sweden that requires that this improvement needs to be done. At the end of the day, the department head and the health and safety representative signs this document. Thereafter, it is the department heads responsibility to follow up these weak points to make sure that they are corrected during this year. If you wish to obtain more details from this document you can contact your department head or health and safety representative.

Environment al goals

We have also suggested some new environmental goals for the coming years within the areas of organization and leadership, research travel, chemicals, etc. These are described in detail at the intranet.

Faculty

I have some news regarding the faculty. Torkel Strömstedt has been appointed as a Guest Professor in Industrial Economy with the Focus on Economy Control. He will be working at the Department of Industrial Economy and Management. Also, Jennie Björk has obtained the title Docent in Product Innovations.  She is working at the Department of Machine Design.

Finally, I must say that I was quite shocked this weekend when I went to a family reunion outside Ludvika. It was very cold and it had snowed almost 10 cm! during the night. Snow in May! I long for the summer!, as I guess most of you do?

Pär Jönsson, Vice Dean

Since my last blog things has been dragging along as usual. Nevertheless, the work is by far not boring!  However, before I explore more about this topic I wish to convey the happy news that Sofia Ritzén has been promoted to a professor at the Departemnt of Machine Design and that Torskel Strömstedt has  been appointed as a guest professor at the Department of Industrial Economy.

Now back to my comments on the recruitment work. It is important to stay concentrated in order to not miss important details, which will slow down the recruitment process. For example, the process for recruiting new faculty involves communication with many people. Here, it is extremely important that me, Anton Lagerbäck and Gülten Baysal communicate on a regular basis. They, in turn, communicate with the department heads and administrative responsible persons at the department. Also, as I mentioned in my previous blogs the contacts with experts and the interviews are organized centrally at KTH. Recently the people working with recruitments on the KTH level have received a much increased work load due to a larger demand of recruiting new faculty. Here, our school currently has the largest recruitment needs among the schools: This is partly due to the hiring of the new faculty in Södertälje, where we now are recruiting eight new teachers.

Due to the large number of positions being advertised from the ITM school this year, we need to set up many interviews with the best candidates for respective position. This has been shown to be much more difficult than expected. After all candidates are known we select a chair person, a representant from the department and a teacher representant. Thereafter, this committee selects one woman and one man, with no conflicts of interests with the candidates, from the list of experts that have been made before submitting the proposal to KTH. Then, KTH will have to approve these experts before sending them out the applications to the experts.

As we have seen recently it is quite common that some of the experts are delayed with their feedbacks, which makes it harder for us to proceed to the next step of the recruitment process. Here, we have a lesson to learn to carefully consider if a suggested expert is a person that actually will have the time to complete a review in time. This is not only a problem at KTH, but also at other universities. Therefore, one university has recently started to give experts a bonus if they come in with their answers before the deadline. Personally, I believe that this is a pretty clever idea since a faster answer as well as an answer received at a made deadline makes it easier for us to plan the latter part of the recruitment process!

The last example I wish to bring up is the setting up of a date for the interview of the selected candidates. Here, typically the 3 to 5 most qualified candidates, including at least one man and one woman, are selected for the final interview. Here, the rules are such that we need to have three people present in the committee, whereof at least one man and one woman, and at least one of the two experts needs to be present at the interview. Due to our faculties heavily booked agendas, this has been shown to be a real obstacle to enable a fast hiring process. Thus, even if we carefully select a recruitment committee, we will in most cases have to exchange one member in order to keep a date already set for an interview. Even today when I am writing this blog I am desperately seeking a member for an interview on April 27. So, as I stated in the beginning even if it is business as usual, the work is not boring!

Pär Jönsson, Vice Dean

As you know from my previous blogs, the recruitment of new faculty members is a time consuming task that needs good planning. Here, it is clear that most of us think that everybody knows a lot more about what we do, than is true in the reality. Thus, it is extremely important that we prepare applications for the recruitment of new faculty that clearly describes their place in the organization as well as their tasks in a pedagogic manner. We are not fully there yet but we have taken some major steps towards that direction. For example, we have defined some key numbers of estimating how many faculty members we can “afford to have” in different departments.

I also want to give you an update on the recruitments of new faculty members. On March 8 the ITM school presented 8 new faculty positions at the KTH faculty council. As a comparison, the remaining schools at KTH presented three positions all together. So it is clear that we have a larger demand for finding new faculty compared to the rest of KTH. The following new positions were presented for the Faculty Council:

• Lecturer in leadership and business development (TMT)
• Assistant Professor in Industrial Dynamics with focus on innovation and business models for a circular economy (INDEK)
• Industrial Marketing with Specialization in E-Commerce (INDEK)
• Associate Professor in Crystallization Processes (MSE)
• Assistant Professor in Powder Metallurgy (MSE)
• Assistant Professor in Materials Design with Focus on Additive Manufacturing (MSE)
• Assistant Professor in Mechatronics with a focus on robotic design (MMK)
• Assistant Professor in Renewable Energy (EGI)

Next the employment profiles of these positions will be scrutinized carefully, before they will be advertised. Here, we hope for a large number of applications from talented candidates.

This week an important survey was sent out to all employees at ITM. In Swedish it is called “medarbetarundersökning (MUS)”, which it is a survey regarding how you as an employee can express your individual opinions regarding your situation at work. I would strongly encourage you all to fill out this survey form, since this is an excellent way for you to give a feedback to the management. We look very seriously on these results. Specifically, we try to analyze good and bad parts. The bad parts we will initiate task groups to start improvements. As you know, as a result of previous surveys we have initiated many groups focusing on improving the working environment in the school with respect to chemicals, fire prevention etc. I should also mention that we are preparing a survey for scholarship students to be distributed separately.

So before you take your break to enjoy the sunny spring weather this weekend, please spend 10-20 minutes to fill out the employee survey. It is very important for us to know YOUR opinion !!!!!!

/Pär Jönsson, Vice Dean

The working environment for the personnel and the student is an important part of ITM’s work. At Dean’s office we have weekly meetings between me, Annika Lilja and Sofia Granberg and sometimes even other persons to discuss the progress regarding our systematic work focusing on the different part of the environment. During the last two years we have tried to organize the work in different groups. This has led to the decision that we have hired the following persons part time at Deans* office to be responsible for the following tasks:

• Valter Ström for the chemicals
• Anders Tilliander for the fire safety
• Peter Hill for the inflammable goods

Each of these three persons is in turn responsible for a group consisting of people from each of ITM’s departments. They meet four times a year to discuss different issues such as needs for education of personnel, smart solutions that was found by one department and that can be transferred to other departments, etc. Thus, we have created groups of specialists that can learn from each other as well as discuss issues related to their focus areas.

As an important part of the Deans’ office systematic work on issues related to the working environment, we also meet Valter, Anders and Peter four times a year to inform each other regarding what each group is working on. At these meetings, Annika and Sofia inform and discuss activities that take place in their KTH network on environmental issues. In addition, Anna Thöresson Berg participates as the responsible for the psycho-social work within ITM. The last important member of this group is Staffan Qvarnström, who is ITM’s main Health and safety representant. He also has his own network of people from each department.

I should also mention that within ITM’s group we make a budget for the coming year regarding the needs of educations, support etc. Thereafter, this budget is later on presented for the ITM board that makes the final decision on the amount. So far the board has been very positive towards our activities so we feel that we have a strong support from the leadership. You can find more information on our at ITM’s intranet.

I also want to inform you about an important part of our systematic environmental work that will take place soon. It is time for our annual safety inspections at each department. These will take place at the following times:

• March 7, Materials Science and Engineering
• March 9, Industrial Economics and Management and Deans Office
• March 11, Industrial Production
• March 14, Applied Mechanical Engineering
• March 21, Machine Design
• March 29, Energy Technology

As part of the budget each year we also include specially targeted wellness activities directed to promote your health (friskvård). Here, we send out a question to you (both our personnel and scholarship students) to ask which activities you prefer. Thereafter, we select the activities that most people have voted for. Please visit ITM’s intranet to see what activities that are offered by us.

Personally, I try to join the floorball group once or twice a week because I think it is a whole lot of fun. Maybe I will see you at that activity or at least that I see you in the KTH hall in the future?

Pär Jönsson, Vice Dean