Dear colleagues,
I hope that all of you have enjoyed a relaxing Easter holiday with the closest family and closest friends. People like me, interested in gardening, did not think that the weather was good enough to spend a whole lot of time in the garden. But we know that warmer days will come!

No matter what you did on your holiday or what you do on your free time, it is important that it is not KTH work. It is a challenge, when most of the ITM employees work from home, to clearly separate the working time from the free time. I know many people have complained about this difficulty. I have heard cases where employees have agreed with their closest manager that they check in for work during a certain time span and then checks out after the working day is over. In this way, it is easier to separate the working time from the free time, when working from home.

We are in the middle of a re-exam period and many of you are involved in this new experience. We have suddenly fast been moved into the digital world of giving exams and most of us did not have a clue on how to do this. Just before Easter KTH tested on how to give exams including how to supervise students during an exam. This has been a challenge so far and it is not perfect, but as I mentioned in the headline “practice make perfect”. We will learn from each others experiences so that each one of us becomes more skilled in performing this new task.

I especially want to mention the need for having people supervising exams (tentavakter). KTH will not allow external people to be involved, so we will need to handle it by ourselves. We need to help each other between divisions and departments. One of the schools at KTH asked teachers and PhD students to volunteer for taking on these assignments. The result? …160 persons said that they are willing to help. This is impressive, but I hope that we at ITM have the same spirit among the teachers and PhD students!

Finally, I want to share a personal experience with respect to the English phrase “practice make perfect”. Yesterday, I hosted a digital PhD examination where my and Michael Vynnycky’s student Arash Safavi Nick defended his thesis. The three of us were gathered in the green room at KTH B for the defense. Everything had been planned well by the Service Center including the setup of the camera before the defense and starting the webinar. A few minutes before 10 am everyone is online, except for the opponent. It is during this times you start to think why is this happening now?….. Then, unexpectedly a voice comes up and says that I am from the KTH IT service and I am just checking in to see if everything is going well. After a phone call from this person to the opponent, the opponent managed to get him online. Puh! We were finally back in business!

So how was the defence? Well it became one of the longest defences I experienced. The open part took slightly more than four hours and the candidate got 137 (!) questions and comments. At the end of the day, the committee was very satisfied with the thesis and the answers to the questions, so ITM received a new Doctor, namely Dr Arash Safavi Nick. After the long defence, the supervisors and the new Doctor had a late lunch to celebrate the accomplishment of Arash. We also celebrated that we had been able to take the first step in to the new world of carrying out digital PhD defences. We are not perfect at this stage, but with practice we will excel our skills!

Pär Jönsson, Head of the ITM School

Dear colleagues,
First, I wish to thank all of you for your fine work, even though most of you have to carry out your tasks from home. It seems like we all have learned a new way of working. It seems so natural to have the meetings using Zoom today, so that many times I wonder why we did not use it more often.

Still, I wish to stress the importance of keeping yourself updated on the corona situation by reading www.kth.se/corona. As I mentioned before, the President has a crisis group that meet every day. Based on these meetings the website is being updated every day.

I also wish to share some information on what is going on:

• The ITM management group meet officially every Tuesday between 15.00 – 17.00 in order to inform each other about the current situation and to make things work as smooth as possible.
• The Learning department is working extra hard to be a support to all teachers needing to transform to the new situation. Currently there is also a focus on how to assist teachers in giving digital examinations in the upcoming Easter exam period. A very good news and example of how we collaborate during these times is that 15 other people from KTH have joined their efforts to help the Learning department to carry out these important tasks to assist KTH’s teachers.
• The administration is working as usual, but we are using digital signatures to a greater extent, to speed up each case. I think all of you can see from your e-mails that the administration response to your requests fast.
• The President has made a decision to move the RAE visit week to 2021 (week 34). In total 82 international and national experts are involved in this evaluation and it is too hard to carry out this big event as was planned to take place in August 2020. It should be noted that an internal review will take place during 2020, based on the information that already has been gathered by all researchers.

Finally, I again wish to thank all of you for trying to do your best working from your homes. This is a new situation for all of us and we need to find new ways to fulfil our duties at KTH.  Also, do not forget to get some fresh air during your breaks. The spring is slowly showing up and it is quite refreshing to get some sun and a nice walk in the nearby neighborhood.

/Pär Jönsson, Head of the ITM School

Dear colleagues, I hope that all of you had a relaxing and fun time with family and friends during the holidays!

All leaders at ITM will gather at the conference center Såstaholm during January 16 to 17 for our annual leadership conference. This year the first day will focus on gender aspects under the lead of our JMLA Professor Annika Borgenstam. This is a follow-up of the four-day education for our unit leaders that took place during 2019. However, we will now begin making specific plans on how to continue the work on gender and equal treatment issues in respective department. The second day of the conference is organized by our HR manager Anna Blendow. Here, specific examples of situations leaders can bump into will be presented, and we’ll work together on how to strengthen the leadership of the ITM leaders.

I also wish to mention that I met with some of the Health and Safety representatives at ITM on January 9. It was very interesting to discuss both what they have been working with as well as how we can improve the collaboration between them and the management at the departments and at ITM. Currently, ITM lacks representatives from the Departments of Materials Science and Engineering and the Department of Industrial Production. However, I know that the unions at KTH are working on finding representatives here. A person having this appointment will learn a lot from being involved in systematic environmental work, reorganizations, reconstructions, etc. In fact, such an appointment is very good for a person’s curriculum for example if the person has the intention to apply for leadership positions in the future. We need engaged personnel that contributes to collaborations at ITM.

This spring, the research evaluation RAE2020 will be in focus and involve most researchers at ITM. President Sigbritt Karlsson wishes that the departments focus on their future development plans and get a specific feedback on these plans from international and national experts, mostly from academia, but also from industry. Those of us that have participated in RAE2008 and RAE2012 know that it is a lot of work, but also very fun!

Now that we all are back to work we enter a new exciting time – we are entering a new decade. We do not exactly now what will happen but only that all of us will influence what happens here at ITM. The quality of ITM’s work dependent on the engagement from each and every one of us.

/Pär Jönsson, Head of the ITM School