Dear everyone,

On my way to work this morning in the gray weather, I became aware of a man standing next to his bike, looking towards Løvstakken. There was a double rainbow with a magical gleam! Then I thought a bit about the situation at the Department of Clinical Science (K2): we are in a very dark financial situation, but this week we celebrated the opening of the KG Jebsen Center for Myeloid Blood Cancer c-myc, led by Bjørn Tore Gjertsen. It is the 4th KG Jebsen center we have at the department (out of 8 at UiB)! The opening was marked with a two-day symposium with many fine words, and not least exciting scientific lectures. As a very proud head of department, I was able to both thank the foundation for the financial support and congratulate Bjørn Tore. I look forward to following the development of the center and am sure that it will shine as much as the rainbow this morning!

Otherwise, this week we have had a GMO inspection. K2 was praised for having regular internal checks (thank you very much, Siv Lise!), and what was criticized is easy to do something about. So thank you very much to everyone who has contributed to a well-conducted inspection! And a little reminder to everyone who works with GMO that there is a lot of paperwork that needs to be done and not least lab routines that are important to follow.

And I will end with reminding everyone that the faculty is organizing a joint teaching day (in Norwegian) September 24 in the auditorium of AHH.

Have a great weekend!

Greetings from Silke

As the newly appointed research leader at K2, this is my first editorial in K2-nytt. I am a medical specialist in infectious diseases and completed a PhD in 2012 on clinical and immunological analyses of patients with long-term complaints following the Giardia outbreak in 2004. Since then, I have researched diarrheal diseases and immunology with Giardia, ETEC, and Cryptosporidium as my favorite microbes.

In my new role, there is much I want to familiarize myself with. I have started by getting an overview of the research activities at K2. Measured in publications, K2 is involved in around 480 scientific articles per year. This has been stable over the past four years. 65% of our publications have international co-authorship, and 89% are published with open access. It is gratifying that the proportion of high-quality publications, published in the more selective level-2 journals, has shown positive development from 18% in 2021 to 25% in 2023. Our research publication relative to our number of first positions and full-time equivalents has remained stable in recent years.

The goal must be to maintain or improve the quality and research production at K2 despite tight finances and necessary cost-saving measures that must be implemented this year and next year. We managed to keep going through the pandemic, and I see it as an important task for me in my role as research leader at K2 to help ensure that we achieve this in the future as well.

I have an office on the 5th floor of the Lab building if you want to have a chat with me. For those interested in more publication statistics from UiB, this can be found at https://bibliometri.w.uib.no/