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ITM has received a task from the president to lead a four year initiative on circular economy. A group has been formed at ITH led by Amir Rashid (IIP). Initially, meetings have been held with participants from the departments within ITM: Sofia Ritzen (MMK), Semida Silviera (EGI), Cali Nuur (INDEK) and me. The initial aim is to inform each other on activities that are held at different departments and to identify interesting areas of future research as well as possibilities to develop inter disciplinary courses. The activities of this group will be presented by Amir at an ITM faculty club meeting on October 24 in order to both inform interested faculty members as well as to receive feedback from them. In the next step, interested researchers from other schools will be contacted (ABE, SCI, CHE and maybe others). Our aim is to work together during these four years to form a plat form for a future collaboration regarding circular economy at a KTH level.
Personally I have also been involved in some circular economy related activities. Two weeks ago I attended a workshop on circular economy in Helsinki focusing on metals. The workshop was led by Maria Wetterstrand who has a long experience working with environmental issues related to production issues. There were also people present from Finland that work on the political side. Many technical talks on recycling of steel, copper, gold silver etc., including my own presentation focusing on steel recycling, were held. Also, the workshop illustrates that several companies have invested in recycling facilities to handle for example shredded steel scrap and electronic scrap. It was also of interest to hear that some speakers including politicians claimed that we should have production of metals and mining in Sweden in Finland since we then can make sure that we take an environmental responsibility after, for example, a mine is closed down.
Finally, I must say that it is hard to believe that we have already reached the end of period 1! I was a teacher in production of metals and fiber for the third year BSc students in the materials design program together with professor Gunnar Henriksson from the school of chemistry (CHE). This year the student visited Boliden in Skellefteå to study the production of copper at Boliden and to get informed of typical jobs that they can obtain after they have completed their education at KTH. Despite that the student had to go by bus (we could not afford flying) they were satisfied with the chance to the production facility. Overall, Boliden is a company that practices “circular economy”. Your used computers and mobile phones are melted to produce new metals. Specifically, the annual production of three important metals based on 120 000 tonnes of recycled scrap is the following:
Gold 2000 kg
Silver 32 000 kg
Copper 15 500 tonnes
So, if you wish to play a role in the circular economy you could start by recycling your electronic scrap (phones, computers, etc.) so that the valuable metals can be extracted and used to produce new products!
Pär Jönsson, Vice Dean
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The Office of Student Affairs has moved to Lindstedtsvägen 3, 6 tr. We have now made a joint decision to extend the office’s service and availability towards students pursuing programmes at the school.
As from December 1st a service desk will be in operation, Monday-Thursday from 09:00-13:00. A telephone service is also being introduced to the service desk during the same opening hours. The aim is that the desk will provide students with a quick and easy way of finding answers to questions relating to their studies. Students can also come here for assistance in booking an appointment for study counselling or international coordinators for more complicated issues.
On Tuesdays and Thursdays the office will have drop-in times from 09:00-11:30.
To minimise visits, emails and phone calls about “simple questions”, a project is being launched that will review the information flow on the school’s website and on the two monitors that will be installed by the entrance to the office as well as the service desk.
With regard to emails, the aim is that these will be answered within 48 hours. All phone calls must have active call forwarding when a person is not present or is unable to answer.
We hope that this will enhance the service level as well as availability towards students at the school, and also within the organisation!
Salary review 2016
Work is under way on this year’s salary review, and most salary discussions have been completed. The aim is that new salaries will be paid on December 23rd, backdated to October 1st, which is the review date. The ITM intranet has information for all parties together with guidelines on setting salaries at ITM.
The agreements concluded so far this year in the Swedish labour market have been at a level of 2.2% with a contract period of 12 months. In view of this, and with due consideration of KTH’s financial situation, at present this is the guideline to which we must adhere in the 2016 salary review at KTH.
No special measures have been invoked in this year’s review, but good teaching performance shall be acknowledged.
We hope that we will also be able to keep to the schedule in this year’s review.
/ Christina Carlsson, Head of Administration
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For me, the last week was devoted to the thesis defense of one of my PhD students, David Dilner, and I tried to spend as little time as possible as FA. However, there are always issues that are impossible to postpone and this week I was contacted by the PhD Candidate Advisor, Ingrid Iliou, about a student engaged in an exchange programme. Who is responsible when there are two universities involved? One should be extremely careful when entering into a dual or double degree programme – it is very important to discuss all responsibilities in detail.
The e-ISP will be launched October 1st. There was an information meeting in August and of course not everybody could attend – there will be another meeting later this fall. All students, except those that have set the date for their defense, will have to use the new e-ISP. If you have questions regarding the web based ISP please email e-isp@kth.se., or read more at the ITM Intranet.
/Malin Selleby, FA
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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 50th 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
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Coming back from vacation in august is always a challenge! Prioritisation between different things is difficult. There is simply not enough time available! It is also clear, based on the urgency of matters, that we are a very international university. We have a lot of our Swedish students coming home after studies abroad with new course portfolios to handle. Some of them look quite different from the agreed upon ones a year or more ago. The most common reason for that is the fact that many other universities seems to be able to stop their courses from being run with very short notice. Our students simply have to find something else of interest. We also have a lot of foreign students coming in for master program studies at ITM (at least 300) but also to a lesser extent for dual degree or so called dual master. Many of us are also quite confused with some of these concepts. On top of that we have paying and non-paying students from Sweden and EU.
A few years ago, if you recall, KTH had a general problem with “The Balance”. We had too many incoming students and too few outgoing and this led to an imbalance. Several activates were initiated to mitigate this. And we have been very successful! We have now since 4-years an international “track” in the M-program, we have rearranged courses and structures in most programs to simplify for our own students to “go out”. We have also sponsored our own MFS (Minor Field Studies) for KEX and MEX students (even if this actually not helps the balance since they are registered at KTH). We have also initiated collaboration with Universities through new master programs mostly in the KIC Inno Energy. Also international collaborative PhD program are running at Energy Technology and Indek.
Do we have a problem, one might ask? On one hand we are doing relatively well at KTH but we also sense a lack of strategic direction at school level. In order to set things straight, on Tuesday this last week the ITM board gathered for a 4 hour creative meeting in Sing-Sing to discuss the strategy for the future. Where are we going from here? Should we go for even more international collaborations through master programs, should we focus on recruiting more paying students or should we further intensify our efforts to send out our own students, or all of it, at the same time?
A few things were clear: International collaboration requires resources. Several good proposals were made and among these are to better utilize already existing research collaborations. Also to investigate the possibilities to use existing networks such as Cluster in Europe. The KTH prioritized regions were also discussed. Another issue is underutilization of funding opportunities from EU Erasmus + for instance.
Stay tuned for some new working groups during the fall!
/ Per Lundqvist, GA
