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Every month the PAs (persons responsible for the five doctoral programs at ITM) meet together with me and Gülten to discuss issues related to doctoral studies. We discuss new regulations, doctoral programs, courses, study plans, advance reviews, grants etc. Next meeting is scheduled to June 20 and to this meeting we have invited the responsible PhD students (PADs). I think that we should interact more with the PhD students in order to create an even better research study environment at ITM and this is a first step in that direction.
Some news and information regarding the administration of doctoral studies are
- e-ISP will (most likely – awaiting decision) be implemented starting September 1st – so after the summer all* study plans should be submitted electronically
- a new form must be handed in to DO with a suggestion who should be appointed advance reviewer for doctoral and licentiate theses. The decision is thereafter taken by FA. This means that an additional two weeks are needed to handle this new process which mean that the suggestion should be handed in 11 weeks before the defense.
To end with something a little bit more existing and positive I would like to point out that all (?) doctoral courses at KTH can be found on the web! Not all course syllabuses for the ITM courses have been translated into English but we are working on that.
*students that have less than 1 year to their defense will probably not need to change systems.
/ Malin Selleby, FA
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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
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The school has closed its books at SEK -4.2m for the period January-April 2016. The budget for the whole year is SEK +3.6m. The discrepancy between budget and the result is primarily due to salary costs and external revenue.
Revenue (SEK, millions)
| Gru |
81,536 |
| FoFu |
43,218 |
| Grants, external |
51,500 |
| Commissions, external |
3,122 |
| Other revenue |
2,472 |
| Financial |
10 |
Costs (SEK, millions)
| Salaries |
105,968 |
| Premises |
26,226 |
| Travel expenses |
4,761 |
| Equipment excl. depreciation |
2,869 |
| Consultancy services |
5,675 |
| Operations and other |
6,272 |
| TB |
22,593 |
| Especially TB GRU KTH |
7,627 |
| Depreciation |
4,129 |
| Financial |
11 |
Yours sincerely,
Christina, Head of Administration
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Sitting at Arlanda Gate 6 a Sunday morning at 8 is a rather typical example of our working life at the ITM-school. I am on my way for two days in Wien to evaluate the energy research at AIT, Austrian Institute of Technology. Waiting at the gate watching people come and go is a good opportunity to reflect on international collaboration in general. Based on the recent number of applications received we are likely to enrol a record number of both paying and non-paying master students this fall. It looks very good. On the other hand, it is more work for us. Then, a colleague at the ABE School Olga pops up with Victor from our Int. office. This even more proves my point that this is rather normal for a KTH employee…
This week the important GA-meeting is handled for us by vice-GA Catharina Erlich and I am back on Wednesday morning. We are all eagerly awaiting the so-called “Axelsson Report” proposing new guidelines for KTH´s educational structure. One particularly important issue I see right now is however NOT included. It seems to me that we now have the possibility to build a smart new ICT infrastructure to manage our education including course management, electronic anonymized exams, reporting credits, following up programs and so on. You all know by now that we are supposed to switch from Bilda to Canvas (very probably) and from Ladok 2 to Ladok 3 and so on. What other changes are there in the future? Is it possible to integrate the systems? Who takes the lead? We cannot let those systems evolve one more time on their own without the obvious integration!
Finally some happy notes! We have had two anniversaries recently. I-section and program (I) turned 25 y old and our newest section, Energy and environmental engineering (W), turned 5. Congratulations!!! Who is next? Our program chair for the Material Design program Anders Eliasson claimed that a 200 y anniversary (!) was coming up soon in 2019. And we have the Campus Valhallavägen 100 y coming up in 2017.
/Per Lundqvist, GA
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This is a report from the ongoing PhD conference at Skogshem & Wijk at Lidingö. The event started with lunch and the first presenter was the dean of the school, Jan Wikander, who gave a short introduction to the school from different perspectives. Three of the so called PAs for the doctoral programs participated the first day: Rahmat Khodabandeh (also vice FA, Energy and Environmental systems), Johann Packendorff (Industrial Economics & Management) and Daniel Tesfamariam Semere (Production Engineering).
The afternoon that followed was devoted to gender issues – Charlotte Holgersson started off by giving us some historical background of women at KTH, reminding us that the first female PhD graduated in the 1950’s and the first female professor was installed in the 1970’s, and continued by giving us examples from the SHE figures 2015. One of the participants suggested that it is just a matter of choice – women do not choose engineering. But that does not explain the leakage of women that can clearly be seen in these numbers from KTH: 32 % of the students are female, 26 % of the PhD students and only 15 % of the professors. The gender and diversity theme continued with an interactive theatre group. During the performance about the relationship between supervisor and candidate the audience got really involved and a few got up on stage.
In the evening there was a poster session with a lot of discussions and hopefully we will get many reports from the PhD students describing connections between different research fields at ITM. This is the way that the students may get credits from the conference.
On Thursday morning it was raining and the scheduled open-air-quiz was transformed to a web competition between teams with questions related to the PhD studies at ITM. The PA of the Machine Design program, Mats Magnusson, Rahmat, Gülten and I formed the team ‘Old guys’ and did pretty well. The PhD Chapter was responsible for this part of the program and took the opportunity to inform about their activities and how students can be involved in the work.
Finally, Sven Ove Hansson, professor in Philosophy at KTH, gave a talk about research and publication ethics and then invited the participants to discuss some ethically challenging cases.
When I talked with the two members of the theatre group about the gender distribution at the conference their feeling was that there were many male students whereas I was just about to say –yes we have many female students here today! – in my world (KTH) having about 30 % women is good.
/ Malin Selleby, FA
