However, it is perhaps more important than ever to collaborate across disciplines, institutions, countries and expertise to find solutions to the complex challenges facing society.
Collaboration can, for example, look like the university alliance Stockholm Trio where we work together with Karolinska Institutet and Stockholm University in education and research and where our differences can be said to be one of our strengths. We are different in both size and focus, but we complement each other and are all located in the science and innovation hub Stockholm.
This autumn, our new joint and international master’s programme in biostatistics and computer science will start, which will generate a wide range of skills among our students. Fortunately, the application pressure has been great and, like the previous joint master’s programme in life sciences, this type of investment definitely gives us a taste for more. Perhaps this mix of skills will be characteristic of future students from Stockholm when they are in demand in the global labour market.
Overall, the Stockholm Trio is one of the world’s leading universities with a total of 62,000 students and 17,500 employees. Together we account for almost a third of Sweden’s research and postgraduate education and almost 20 per cent of all students in the country. In addition, we are neighbours in Stockholm and have more or less contiguous campuses.
Another exciting collaboration is the one we have had with four other leading technical universities in the Nordic region for almost 20 years. Nordic5Tech, or N5T, is a strategic alliance between KTH, NTNU in Trondheim, Aalto in Helsinki, DTU in Copenhagen and Chalmers.
These universities are scientifically similar and we share many challenges with them. We complement, strengthen and inspire each other in research, education and innovation. N5T offers, among other things, joint master’s programmes, student exchanges and a joint portal for courses in postgraduate education. KTH and Aalto, together with another seven universities, are also part of Unite!, which is part of the EU’s “European University Initiative” (EUI). Unite offers many opportunities for student exchanges and participation in programmes throughout Europe and international research collaborations. Together with more than 50 universities with a technical and scientific focus in Europe, we are members of CESAER. This is primarily a network for opinion formation, political monitoring and debate at the European level. In addition to all the fairly close cooperation that we have in Sweden, the Nordic countries and Europe, we also have strategic cooperation agreements with a limited number of universities around the world.
University collaborations are, as I said, important for KTH and I hope we can continue to develop these in a strategic way with clear purposes and effects.