The Christmas and new year that you deserve

(Search on Youtube for “holiday night fever commercial” before reading!)

There are reasons why you should be or not be happy that the Christmas holidays are coming and the year 2024 is looming. It all comes back to two simple questions: how do you judge your 2023? How do you see the incoming challenges in 2024?

This is a post on KTH pages related to work, so I guess it is about work that we should discuss. However I want to make clear one thing: there is no work satisfaction (or dissatisfaction) that should impede you from having a healthy, balanced, interesting life outside the office. Sacrificing your family, relations, and friends chasing your career is not going to work forever. Sooner or later you will pay it back, in one way or another. You are warned!

So how do we feel about EMD 2023?

I’ll speak for myself, then everyone else in the team can express their views in separate posts…

I have referenced to a Youtube video showing the latest advertisement for a US credit card. It is not about the credit card I want to discuss (throw that part away from the video) but of Santa Claus himself. Do you know who is Santa in the video? If you are not too young, you should have recognized John Travolta, stepping back years in his role as the Italian-American Tony Manero in “Saturday Night Fever” (1977). The sketch also retraces some of the initial sequences of the original movie.

I have always admired John Travolta’s dancing prowess and I think it combines well to Santa’s main character to create a cool happy dude. That’s the same I feel about the past year at EMD. But I cannot dance like that so I let someone do it better :-).

There are many things that make me think positive about what we did. For the first, we must underline that the overall funding situation for our field of research is not the best you can find out there, with funding agencies largely ignoring the importance of electrical machines, their design, and their control for the great goals of sustainability. But I stopped complaining too much about that because we managed anyhow, and there are reasons to be happy beyond that.

Teaching is going well, very well indeed. Every year I get a group of students who enter the course EJ2201 Electrical Machines and Drives completely unaware of what is coming and get out of the course overwhelmed – with knowledge 🙂 . I can see that many develop an interest in the subject after going through the course, which is a good sign. Others are there only because they are forced to, but still, they seem to have a reasonably good time. All in all, I think that this entry course is very important to establish connections.

For those bold students that decide to continue on the path, from 2023 I have been also appointed responsible for the course EJ2230 Control in Electrical Energy Conversion, which is essentially control of electric machines. I did not have much time to make modifications to its content in 2023, but I am now almost ready for the next 2024 round, and I am excited about that.

I have also received great help during these three last years to keep alive the course EJ2222 Design of Electrical Machines, which came under my responsibility after the passing of our dear colleague Oskar, but that I never had time to develop as it has always been overlapping with EJ2201. Mats has helped me significantly to keep it going, and I will always be grateful for that. Now the situation has changed: I have reshuffled the courses along the year so that EJ2222 does not clash any longer with any other course I am responsible for. So! Are you really interested in electrical machines and drives? Join the master of electrical engineering at KTH and you will be able to:

• join EJ2201 in the first semester, period 1 and period 2, August to December;
• join EJ2230 in the second semester, period 3, January to March;
• join EJ2222 in the second semester, period 4, April to June.

And if you do not have enough of me for an entire year, then you can continue with individual project courses and the master thesis, of course :-).

For those who think that teaching is heavy and a waste of time, I have nothing to say. To me, it is a great source of inspiration, recruiting, and a way to send good students ambassadors to work in the industry – which pays back later on ;-).

I mentioned industries. Yes, Sweden has many in the field and the opportunities to collaborate are also significant. Here the strangest of things happen. I could find 100 things to work on in collaboration with interested companies that would support us. However, the financial side is always an issue: a KTH doctoral student – plus all the overheads – costs a lot of money, and companies do not feel like paying that much without an additional external financial support. I can fully understand them – we are so damn expensive. And so we find ourselves writing applications to funding agencies, with the hope that the latter will recognize the importance of our work… sometimes it goes through, sometimes it does not. We’ll keep trying!

However, there is one company that said no, we do not need to play this game – I will pay you all. Those guys at ABB that decided that are amazing and I am really grateful. And scared: because we have a big responsibility to show the value of the money they invested in us. To be continued in 2024!

Let’s not forget, however, that in 2024 we will run doctoral and post-doctoral projects with many involved companies with big names. ABB, Scania, Volvo Cars, CEVT, Inmotion Technologies, and the little but interesting Zparq AB will be around us. We will deliver and learn a lot from them too.

All of this is not possible without the people – it is always about the people. With the EMD people you go on the safe side: give them a task and they will not disappoint you. On the contrary, they will surprise you with the depth and understanding of their work.

There is too much I could write for each of them and this post would become endless. But I can say this: when I realize that I do not fully understand what they are explaining to me about their work, and therefore I need to search for technical details in my old books and notes, that’s the moment when I feel my mission accomplished. This person has turned into a Searcher (not a researcher… re-searchers are re-searching things, while Searchers bring new things). We have only Searchers at EMD – I can guarantee that. I am proud of their work and how they are growing into their role, and I will support their next steps whatever road they want to take.

Ah yes, on the side of everything else, I also accepted to become deputy head of our division Electric Power and Energy Systems. So far I have been taking care of the “social side” of the division, organizing coffee breaks with sandwiches and pastries (the Swedish “fika”!) and information meetings. In the future, who knows. But it is nice to get in contact with other doctoral students working in other research groups – it gives you perspective, and a feeling of an enlarged family.

Let’s hope we can still be all John Travoltas at the end of 2024. So far so good! Merry Christmas and happy New Year!