“Strong corporate collaboration and world‑class guest professors”

Tue 21 Dec 2021 09:24

The expert panel’s report on STC has now come in Mid Sweden University’s major research evaluation. The panel highlights STC’s corporate collaboration and world-class guest professors as major competitive advantages, but they also see international development opportunities.

ARC21 STC Visit
Sebastian Bader presents his research at the expert panel site visit.

In 2021, Mid Sweden University started an extensive evaluation of research and postgraduate studies, ARC21. The purpose of the evaluation is to get an overall picture of the university’s eight research centers, and also to produce recommendations for further development. The research evaluation has now been carried out and the results of the evaluation panel have reached the research centres.

— It is very valuable for us to have an external look-through of our activities. It gives us a learning experience in the organisation and can help us see new development opportunities, says Mattias O'Nils, head of STC Resarch Centre. 

Site visit and review

The evaluation has been carried out by a panel of experts composed of five people from different backgrounds and perspectives. The panel of experts started with a self-assessment and reports for the Research Centre. During October, a site visit was carried out, where the expert panel had the opportunity to go in depth and interview researchers and doctoral students.

The expert panel’s report has now arrived, which gives many good opinions but also impacts on things that can be improved. The Panel of Experts states that STC shows an outstanding corporate collaboration where researchers have a good ability to understand the industry’s research and knowledge needs.

— It’s good to see that our determined development efforts to improve our collaboration with the surrounding society have yielded results, says Mattias.

An appreciated Professor's program

STC’s commitment to recruiting guest professors was also highly appreciated by the expert panel, which highlights that STC managed to attract world-class guest professors and that there is an opportunity to further develop and benefit from these collaborations. The Expert Panel recommends more research centres at the university to make similar investments.

— Over the last three years, we have invested in a professor’s programme to strengthen our expertise and increase our international networks. It has already proved very successful and will give even more when it has been developed further, Mattias says.

An important development area identified by the Panel of Experts is funding, where there are many opportunities for STC to further develop. 

—The evaluation strengthens us by verifying that we have been developing in the right direction in recent years. It gives us guidance on which issues to focus on in our future development — where the financing issue is perhaps the most important one we have already started working on, Mattias concludes.

 

Expert Panel STC Research Center

Ahmed Jerraya, VP, Cyber Physical Systems programs, CEA Tech, France

Bruno Andò, Associate Professor, University of Catania, Italy

Anna Brunström, Professor, Karlstad University, Sweden

Masoud Bahraini, PhD Student, Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden

Tomas Berg, Director Cloud Transformation, Capgemini Invent, Sweden

 

Read more about ARC21


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The page was updated 12/21/2021