A systematic work focusing on the working environment for the personnel and the student’s is an important ITM task. As we have explained in earlier blogs ITM has appointed the following experts to lead the work in their respective area of expertise:

• 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 experts from each of ITM’s department. 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.

In addition to the above mentioned three experts, Emelie Griplund, Katarina Tersmeden and Anton Lagerbäck from Deans Office as well as Staffan Qvarnström (ITM’s main Health and safety representant) meet four times per year to discuss the overall environmental work at ITM. During our last meeting for the year we summarized the activities during 2016 in a systematic environmental plan, which will be available on the internal web soon. In addition, we made a budget for the planned activities for 2017. This budget will be presented to the ITM board for their approval. The suggested activities include:

• Courses identified by Valter, Anders and Peter to make sure that the personnel at each department obtain the suitable training.
• Courses offered to all personnel at ITM including hints on how to handle stress as well as how to use a hearth starter may be used.
• Sport activities, which were selected based on the input from those of you that had replied to the survey that was sent out (95 people): including massage, badminton, floor hockey, yoga, swimming and core.

I have corrected the exams from period 1 in the two classes I taught. Overall, the students performed very well which is a pleasure for a teacher to experience. Now, in period 2 I am involved in a class where students in the fifth year work on solving industrial problems in collaboration with industry. It is one of the most exciting courses I am involved in and I am looking forward to see their innovative solutions at the end of the semester.

As most of you I feel that December and the holiday is approaching in a rapid speed. It is also a time of the year that has its special feeling, since many people decorate their homes and streets with different lamps to counteract the darkness that this time of the year brings. Is not the LED lamp a brilliant technological innovation!?

Pär Jönsson, Vice Dean

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

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