Istvan Furo

Born in Hungary, educated there, too, until the happy end of having received my PhD in Physics at ELTE, Budapest. Arrived as postdoc to Sweden 1987, stayed here ever since (must love darkness and snow and, possibly, other attributes?). Smallish interruptions abroad (research fellow in Budapest 1989, and guest professor at Nancy, FR 1995, Paris 2001, Wellington, NZ 2003). Assistant professor at Lund University, 1990. Associate professor at KTH 1994, Professor in Physical Chemsitry at KTH, 2006. Typically in charge of something beyond my own activities since 1999. Part-time Pricipal Scientist at GE Healthcare/Cytiva in Uppsala, 2018-20.

Since 2018, Head of the Department of Chemistry. I still believe that the main reason for universities to exist is to educate and to do that well at a high level. Moreover I think that the soul of a university is not contented by a hierarchic and rectangular leadership system and style.

My research is rather much defined by my undying love for NMR spectroscopy and its branches and twigs. As is usual for love, this attachment started by chance and is kept alive by the tangled and subtly complex character of the method. Roughly speaking, I develop NMR methods and use them to investigate materials and processes of various sorts, nowadays such as nanocarbon dispersions, the behaviour of ions in both solutions and solid materials, water in cellulosic materials and various molecular phenomena in porous systems.

Research and teaching meet when one mentors PhD students. I had the good fortune to be able to work with smart, hard-working and very nice people. I hope they permit me to be proud of them.