The faculty day is fast approaching: June 13th where you can “Meet the best!”

Søren Falch’s junior and senior prize will be awarded and the Falch lecture 2019 is held by  Professor Maiken Nedergaard, University of Copenhagen who has conducted exciting translational brain research, including underpinning the importance of the glymphatic system and sleep for brain health!

More awards to be handed out: this year’s publication, this year’s PhD, this year’s research group, prizes for internationalization, outstanding dissemination and teaching. K2 has previously received several prizes, which K2s are being honored this year?

And apropos teaching; since the faculty promotes the new title of “Excellent teacher” (which will actually lead to a salary increase!), here are some career planning tips:

Complete the basic module in pedagogy that was scheduled within two years of hiring in your main UiB position (and finish the compulsory written task/paper), anyone else but me who feel hit by the time-squeeze….?)

Remember to record consecutively in your teaching-portifolio any teaching activites you are contributing to, including teaching administration activities (student rounds, skill sessions, preparing written materials, semester boards, creating quizzes, preparing /evaluating exams), retrospective registration will often lead to missing bits..

Something else however still related to teaching: bioinformatics. This is an increasingly important part of much of our activity; with different “-omics”, both understanding and practical use of different computer science methods are required when we have large datasets with eg genetic data or “big-data” in general. K2 has employed an “own” bioinformatician: Anagha Joshi, but as per. today we have not implemented any structured bioinformatic teaching in our study programs. CBU; Computational Biology Unit runs interdisciplinary (informatics / mathematics / chemistry / biology) research and teaching at various study programs/levels and has initiated a joint call to identify what might be coordinated bioinformatic teaching also in medicine/pharmacy (our study programs).

Can our students benefit from existing courses, for example during elective periods or research-line students/PhD students during other parts of the terms? Is there a need for postgraduate courses in relation to your research/subject area?

Anaghi and I are interested in input that we will convey further. Anaghi will gladly contribute to developing courses, but we want to avoid duplication with already existing courses and rather promote courses “across” study-diciplines.

It has now been two months since our conference at Solstrand, and since then I have gathered all your input from the group work on K2s strategy plan.

All your suggestions amounted to four pages of suggestions on what we should keep from our current plan, and what new goals and measures should be included in our new plan. Among other things, your suggestions were a separate goal on innovation at K2 as well as environmental goals and a green strategy. According to your input, we are still in want of meeting places across internal groupings, and career planning for our younger researchers. I am very grateful for your group work at Solstrand and your good input to the new strategy plan.

The new plan will act for three years from 2020 and part of the leader group at K2 will be involved in editing the existing plan. A draft for the new strategy plan will be distributed to all you after the summer. I hope you will take the time both to read and comment when I send it to you.

Best,
Julie