This year will be an important year for our group, when many things will mature in various ways.
This will be the year when we will have to transform some of the student affiliations into scholarship students, and some of the scholarship students into Ph.D. student affiliations, and in this make use of our various sources of internal and external funding, and make use of all our collaborations with other groups. An example of the latter is our important collaboration with Freiburg, where I (Gunnar) have an external fellowship, and where half of Rikard’s employement is financed.
This will also be a year when we will will transform many of our almost finished projects into publications. Last year we grew substantially in personell, and this has allowed us a quite new work capacity, which we must learn to make use of properly, and make visible in terms of an increased rate of publications. Several papers have also been submitted or re-submitted in the last weeks, and with some luck, this will soon start showing off as new interesting publications, showing some of our ongoing projects more visibly to the rest of the world.
In this early phase of the year, we are also running the second edition of TSRT17, which is our own systems biology course. It is our intention that this year’s edition will be a clear improvement compared to last year, and that we just like last year will be able to recruit some of the most talented students as scholarship or project students.
One example of how this process is continuing is Mikael Forsgren, who took the course last year, has been employed in the group of Peter Lundberg ever since, and is now doing a little project also in our group, where he helps us finalize an interesting project on core-box modeling and back-translation. Two other new people in the group are Lovisa Österlund who is doing a boolean approach to the study of mTOR and autophagy and their relation to insulin signaling, and Gustaf Ullman, who will become our new expert on stochastic and single-molecule modelling and simulations.
We have also continued our team building activities, through regular whole-day meetings where we present our work for each other (see up-coming and previous events), through the continued application of wave and other online communication tools, and through various joint social activities such as weekly game-nights, and a joint vacation weekend in Romme. We also plan to expand our weekly meetings to include seminar-series with internal and external lecturers; this will also be a part of the continued launching and starting up of the Linköping centre for systems biology, which hopefully will also be stimulated by our upcoming recruitment of two world-leading systems biology guest professors.
All in all, we are moving into a very exciting year, where many of the plans and projects that were started last year hopefully will mature and bear lots of scientific fruits.
