The University Alliance Stockholm Trio – Karolinska Institutet, KTH Royal Institute of Technology and Stockholm University – is in its fourth year. SU currently holds the presidency, until 1 July when KTH takes over. Some wonder what has happened during these years. Others worry that the strong brand of each individual university will be lost in Trio-related management. The latter is an unfounded concern. The Stockholm Trio does not have its own logo and has no intention of creating a brand to outshine the three universities. It instead points to the three of us. It is our joint strength that serves as the Trio’s signature.
So, what have we achieved? Within our five priority areas for the period 2022–24, there are a number of examples of how the work has progressed. Here are just a few.
1. Education: A new joint Master’s programme in biostatistics and computer science has been decided and finalised, and will be launched next year.
2. Stockholm Trio for Sustainable Actions – for work with the 2030 Agenda. Here we are organising a GD Forum on 25 April with the theme “Halfway – How to accelerate implementation of the 2030 Agenda”, and many other initiatives have been taken and are well underway.
3. Research infrastructure – a newly appointed group is working, inter alia, with the Stockholm nodes for a number of national projects and infrastructures, such as NAISS (National Academic Infrastructure for Supercomputing in Sweden) and, of course, SciLifeLab Campus Solna.
4. Physical meeting places and physical communications – the latter primarily relates to advocacy work aimed at the city and the region, an important but long-term endeavour.
5. Internationalisation. Our partnerships with the University of Tokyo and University College London are developing well. We also have a small but well-established Brussels office, which through its location in the Stockholm Region also has several important contact points. We are providing input to the next framework programme, FP10, and an appreciated EU course for researchers has been introduced – but above all, we now have a significantly improved knowledge of what is happening at the EU level, which facilitates planning and application work.
Most importantly, we are now seeing the Stockholm Trio starts to grow organically – collaborative initiatives between researchers at our universities want to use the Alliance to highlight our joint strength as a complete university environment. Together, we are among the best in Europe and the world. This is a strength to build on.
This article is written by Astrid Söderbergh Widding, President of Stockholm University. It appears in the section ”Words from the University’s senior management team”, where different members take turns to write about topical issues. The section appears in News for staff which is distributed to the entirety of the University staff.