Maja Fjaestad new Senior Advisor to the President at KI
Maja Fjaestad, former State Secretary at the Ministry of Health and Social Affairs and until now working at the European Commission's AI Office in Brussels, will become Senior Advisor to the President at Karolinska Institutet. The position is newly established and aims to strengthen KI's position as an active and driving social actor.
“We in the university management have the ambition that KI will increase its presence and commitment to the world around us. The role of universities is becoming even more important in times when evidence and real knowledge are increasingly being questioned. I am really pleased that we have been able to recruit Maja Fjaestad and I am very much looking forward to working with her and the other employees at KI to strengthen the position of knowledge in society,” says KI’s president Annika Östman Wernerson.
KI has extensive collaboration with the surrounding society. Primarily because the university's researchers are active and available in news feeds, debates and as experts in various contexts. The new position is primarily focused on strengthening the overall and university-wide presence in society.
“A world-leading medical university like KI has a responsibility to pursue issues regionally, nationally and internationally. We develop knowledge and share it further, primarily by educating our students – but we also need to make this knowledge available to the outside world on a broader level. Maja Fjaestad, with her extensive experience and expertise, will play an important role in this,” says Annika Östman Wernerson.
Maja Fjaestad started at KI on 1 November and will initially focus on building a structure for community-related and proactive activities on issues prioritised by the university management. In the long term, she will probably also take a leading role in the work of developing a new overall strategy and vision.
Maja Fjaestad welcomes the new initiative:
“A university like KI has an important mission to disseminate evidence-based knowledge, and it’s exciting to be a part of this. I am really looking forward to supporting and strengthening the management in KI's community-related work in my new role,” she says.
Maja Fjaestad has previously been affiliated with the Centre for Health Crises at KI, is an associate professor from KTH and has experience from, among others, the Max Planck Institute and MIT, as well as from several Swedish universities. She has been a prolific popular science writer for many years and last year published a book on AI in public decision-making.