Head of Department Letter November 2024

The other physics departments

At the end of October, a group of heads of department from different physics departments in the country met at Chalmers to exchange experiences and to create an active network of heads of department. Participating were physics heads from Chalmers, University of Gothenburg, Uppsala, Stockholm and KTH (physics and applied physics), as well as the heads of microelectronics at Chalmers (Maria Messing!) and space and environmental physics at Chalmers.

There were conversations about physics and personal anecdotes, but also about university politics, money, leadership and sustainability. Chalmers has a nice house in the centre of town that is used for dinners and conferences, much like our Bishop's House, but bigger. In the house there is a bank vault where you can get your own safe deposit box with a key. How much money is in the vault no one can say, but they have a great treasure: a second edition of Newton's Principia.

Universities and their physics departments have chosen to organise themselves in different ways, but otherwise the challenges are broadly the same: How do we fill teaching positions, the balance between quality and cost-effectiveness in teaching, and cost overruns, especially in terms of premises costs. In terms of premises, we live cheaply in Lund. The other institutions pay two to four times more per square metre. It is also common for departments to be co-located. KTH and SU share buildings, as do GU and Chalmers. Colleagues told us about recurring discussions and sometimes friction about who should pay for what.

On the first morning, we external heads of department were somewhat surprised. Our polite hosts were suddenly noticeably annoyed by a person who came into the meeting room to check who was there. The pattern repeated itself during the day and we were told that it was an ongoing measurement where the landlord does extra checks to see how the rooms are used, for future optimisation.

The meeting in Gothenburg was the first of its kind and a lot of time was therefore spent trying to understand how we work in our respective institutions. Hopefully, by the next meeting at AlbaNova in Stockholm next year, there will be more concrete proposals for co-operation. This time we talked a lot about collaborating on the management of the large infrastructures and about trying to collaborate more on advanced courses for doctoral and master's students where it can be difficult to achieve critical mass in each department. We will also see if we can organise a joint debate article on the impact of cost issues on independent research.

We also had time to visit local research laboratories at Chalmers, such as Attohallen, the materials analysis laboratory CMAL and the WACQT centre, where we are also an important partner. It is always fun to discover how much research equipment is available in Sweden and we can definitely get better at utilising each other's local infrastructures. 

It is instructive and inspiring to gain insight into how other physics departments solve their problems, although it is ultimately up to us locally to decide what we want to do with new services and what the costs of operations should be. We will continue to have these discussions.

Else Lytken
Head of Department
Department of Physics