News archive

The yearly StratNeuro retreat gathers neuroscience researchers from Karolinska Institutet, Umeå University, and the Royal Institute of Technology for a couple of days of networking and getting up to date with the latest research from across the spectrum of neuroscience topics aligning with the interests that the StratNeuro constellation represents. This year, our retreat took place on the 29th and 30th of May, at Djurönäset, in a picturesque location by the Stockholm archipelago.

Karolinska Institutet, in partnership with universities in Sub-Saharan Africa, has for the last three years implemented an impactful training programme on innovation for managers within the health sector. “We really need these kinds of efforts to achieve sustainable health. The programme empowers the participants to work together in addressing complex challenges,” says Dr. Rawlance Ndejjo, lead of one of programme's modules.

Medical student Julie Cheung from Karolinska Institutet (KI) recently won first prize at the prestigious Global Undergraduate Awards thesis competition in the category of Medical Sciences.

The Swedish Society of Obstetrics and Gynecology annually awards the best doctoral thesis of the year. 2023 the award goes to Ritah Bakesiima, who completed her dissertation at the Department of Women's and Children's Health last year. Her research studies the barriers to contraception among adolescents, and enlightens the importance of peer counselling in increasing contraceptive uptake.

The Nordic Congress of Gerontology (NKG) is arranged every second year in the Nordic countries and next year Sweden will be hosting the event. The 27th edition will be held at Karolinska Institutet on 12–14 June 2024. It is anticipated that 800 people and scholars from different parts of the world will take part, offering a diverse array of distinctive perspectives on the challenges and opportunities linked to population ageing. Registration will open on 2 October 2023.

The Centre for Health Crises is currently supporting the WHO’s EMT (Emergency Medical Teams) initiative, through mentorship to the Ministries of Health in Georgia and Armenia in their development of EMTs. The director of the Centre, Professor Johan von Schreeb, has just returned from spending ten days in the two countries, working with the Ministries and other partners.

KI has been approved continued funding from the Swedish Institute (SI) to implement a capacity building training programme for professionals in sub-Saharan Africa during the period 2023 - 2024. The programme, which has been running since 2020, has resulted in significant positive changes in the field of reproductive, maternal and newborn health.

STINT, the Swedish Foundation for International Cooperation in Research and Higher Education, annually publishes an index measuring the internationalisation of Swedish higher education institutions. It has now given the maximum of five stars to Karolinska Institutet.

For the eleventh time, the international week was organized by the international occupational therapy team and their partners. The event started with Uganda in 2012, through the Linnaeus-Palme program.

For the eleventh time, the International Week has been arranged by the international team of occupational therapy in collaboration with international partners. It all started in 2012 with Uganda through the Linnaeus-Palme program.

Congratulations to Samer Yammine at the Department of learning, informatics, management and ethics (LIME), who received the award "Male entrepreneurship educator of the year", an award included in The Triple E Awards!

Federico Iovino and his lab members have been awarded with a grant from the ItsME Foundation to enable their research on the prevention of neuronal damage caused by bacterial infections. The ItsME Foundation was founded in 2019 by Jur Deitmers and has its base in The Netherlands, with the goal to fight Meningitis and Encephalitis.

In June 2023 representatives from Karolinska Institutet visited Washington DC and New York City in the US. Connected to several collaborations important to KI and with strategic plans to increase alumni activity in the US, the visit included a SIREUS event hosted at the House of Sweden in DC, as well as two planned alumni events in DC and New York, along with valuable alumni visits to Rockefeller University and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

SFO-V regularly announces calls for partial financing of sabbaticals within health care sciences. This past spring, Susan Guidetti, professor at the Division of Occupational Therapy and Eric Asaba, docent and senior lecturer at the Division of Occupational Therapy were granted funding for sabbaticals in Ugandan and USA, respectively.

The Encephalitis Society is a worldwide international charity with the mission of building better futures by driving research, accelerating awareness, and saving lives. In the latest issue of their newsletter which has been running since 2003, the society has chosen to highlight the research performed in Federico Iovino's group.

Creative ideas were born when the NeurotechEU alliance arranged a hackathon at Karolinska Institutet. “Activities like this highlight the value of having people from other disciplines and countries – and at different stages of their careers – engage in cross-border innovative processes with each other,” says KI president Annika Östman Wernerson.

The SiiUss project (Sustainability, Inclusiveness, Integration for University Support Services), is a collaborative initiative between Karolinska Institutet and the University of the Philippines Diliman. The project introduces the SiiUss course, a learning platform designed to enhance professional development and foster sustainability, inclusiveness, and integration within university support services. The course just started with participants from both universities.

Since attending KI’s capacity-building programme for leaders in women’s and children’s health, Tiwonge Gondwe-Mwangonde has used knowledge gained from the course to reduce the incidence of birth injuries in Malawi. She is now launching a new training programme for the region’s midwives.

Between 13 and 19 March 2023, neuroscientists around the world took the initiative to spread the word about the importance of brain science as part of the "Brain Awareness Week". The Strategic Neuroscience Research Network (StratNeuro) at Karolinska Institutet took the opportunity to initiate a recurring outreach event to spark enthusiasm and raise awareness for neuroscience research, which was also part of the global campaign.

Alone, remotely, in the middle of a pandemic – this is how life in the Brussels office of the University Alliance Stockholm Trio began for the EU veteran Dan Andrée. It went at half-speed at first, but now, two and half years later, the office in the EU’s political cradle is bursting with activities.

As part of the Swedish presidency of the EU's Council of Ministers, the health ministers of EU countries were invited to an informal meeting in Stockholm on the 4th and 5th of May. The meting concerned issues of preparedness and securing access to innovative and established medicines.

Are international field hospitals always needed? And do we always need to send medicines to disaster-stricken areas? These were two myths that Johan von Schreeb discussed in his keynote when EU’s health ministers gathered in Stockholm.

On 21 March 2023, researchers from several universities around the country, the Swedish Agency for Health and Care Services Analysis and Region Jönköping, gathered at Karolinska Institutet in Solna for a symposium on person-centred and integrated care for older people. Moreover, keynote speakers from the UK and Australia set the scene on the topics of person-centred and integrated care.

When Rebecca Furaha was looking for programmes that could help her improve maternity care in Congo-Kinshasa, she found what she was looking for at KI. Now she runs collaborative projects to increase knowledge about sexual and reproductive health among the country’s young people.

On April 26 it has been seven years since Ahmadreza Djalali, a Swedish citizen who received his PhD in disaster medicine at Karolinska Institutet, was arrested during a visit in Iran. Karolinska Institutet and The Human Rights Committee of Sweden’s Scientific and Literary Academies now urge in an open letter to Sweden’s prime minister, foreign minister and education minister to try all means possible to ensure the release of Djalali.

Readership of news articles written by KI researchers for The Conversation jumped 62 percent on the year in 2022. Since KI became a member two years ago, 43 researchers have penned over 42 articles, reaching around 3.8 million readers worldwide. “I have never experienced such a response to my research before,” says postdoc Filip Gedin.

Karolinska Institutet has been awarded a new EU prize for its long-term commitment to gender equality in higher education. The prize of 100,000 euro is the result of nearly 40 years of sustained activity to advance equal opportunities. The efforts have paid off and now KI is recognized as a role model for equality, a “Gender Equality Champion.”

The regulations for which categories of international students and researchers can be offered accommodation from Swedish universities have recently changed. A new ordinance gives all universities the opportunity to offer housing to selected groups of students and researchers. However, this means that KI does not have the opportunity to offer housing to the same extent as before.

Application is now open for a new global leadership programme; Leadership for Transformative Change. The programme targets leaders from all over the world who are working to contribute to transformative social development in their countries. It is offered by Uppsala University in collaboration with Karolinska Institutet, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Business Sweden, the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and SALAR International.

When Harriet Nakigozi heard about the course “Managing innovation for sustainable health”, she was in the middle of her postgraduate studies. Despite that, she applied to join the course. It soon turned out to be the right decision as the two courses supported each other.

When Tewodros Seyoum wanted to improve his competence and leadership skills as a midwife, a KI education was the obvious choice. The training opened the door to a more active leadership style and knowledge that contributes to improving the Ethiopian healthcare system.

Are you interested to know what it's like to study abroad? Then you should check out the Study Abroad blog, where KI students share their lives as exchange students. New Zealand, London, and Spain are some of the places where the current KI students are spending this spring semester.

Dariia Chernovska was following her dream, studying medicine at Bogomolets National Medical University in Kyiv, when Russia invaded Ukraine and she was forced to flee. Now she is carrying out an internship at the department of physiology and pharmacology in Daniel Andersson's lab and has her sights set on studying medicine at Karolinska Institutet in the autumn.

The Swedish presidency of the EU began in the new year and so much is evident, especially when it comes to issues of healthcare. Anna Martling, chief physician and professor of surgery at Karolinska Institutet, will be leading the EU Cancer Congress, which kicks off in Stockholm on 1 February.

Researchers at Karolinska Institutet, the Centre for Imaging Research (CIR), SciLifeLab, and RISE have together received a grant of over SEK 100 million from the European Commission's Digital Europe programme. The project, called TEF-Health, will, among other things, promote the rapid introduction of new artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics solutions in healthcare.

The autumn semester of 2022 saw a new cohort of students arriving at KI to study the part of the Erasmus Mundus Master’s programme Public Health in Disasters, which is conducted by the Centre for Research on Health Care in Disasters. One of the students who came to Stockholm is Bahaa, who is really enjoying his time at KI and in Stockholm.

At its meeting of 30 September, the Karolinska Institutet University Board decided that the Ming Wai Lau Centre for Reparative Medicine (MWLC), KI’s research centre in Hong Kong, is to close at the turn of 2023/2024.

David Marlevi, Enric Llorens and Onur Dagliyan have been awarded the 2022 ERC Starting Grant. Their projects concern multiscale imaging for cardiovascular diseases, self-repairing injured tissues in mammals and new molecular technology for cellular circuits.

Eleven Non-European Master’s students received Karolinska Institutet’s Global Masters scholarship at an annual ceremony in Aula Medica.

During a visit to Sweden this week, WHO Europe’s director Dr Hans Kluge had time for a brief, but cordial, visit to KI. Dr Kluge met with Vice President Anders Gustafsson and the director of the Centre for Health Crises, Professor Johan von Schreeb, along with the centre’s strategic process leader Dr Anna Zorzet. The quartet talked about matters of common interest and about initiatives related to health crises in particular.

Anneli Eriksson, research specialist at the Centre for Research on Health Care in Disasters and a specialised nurse with extensive field experience, was on her way to Spain when she turned on her heel and instead headed straight to Uganda, to work in a coordinator role for Médecins sans frontières (MSF) Sweden in their efforts to assist in the current and ongoing Ebola outbreak in the country.

EU-OPENSCREEN is a European network that provides infrastructure for high-capacity screening in chemical biology and early identification of drug candidates. As of July 2022, Sweden is represented in the network, through the Chemical Biology Consortium Sweden (CBCS) at Karolinska Institutet, one of two selected Swedish nodes.

Karolinska Institutet has signed a collaboration agreement with the European research infrastructure EBRAINS, which offers digital tools and services for research into the brain. The purpose of this agreement is to give KI's researchers access to new digital technology and state-of-the-art resources, as well as the opportunity to contribute to the further development of the area of neuroscience within the EU.

KI is ranked 41 in the 2022 Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), also known as the Shanghai ranking. This means that Karolinska Institutet (KI) retains its position as one of the world's 50 highest-ranked universities, where the ranking has varied between positions 38 and 45 over the past five years (2021: position 42). KI is also one of Europe's and the EU's highest-ranked universities. ARWU is based, among other things, on publication- and citation data and scientific awards.

On 18-20 May 18 2022 we were excited to finally host the annual StratNeuro retreat at Runö in Åkersberga. This year's retreat was somewhat special. Many were eager to meet again, and the organisers worked hard to make this meeting a productive and memorable one.

Several co-workers from ARC attended the 26th Nordic Congress of Gerontology (26NKG), which took place on 8-10 June in Odense, Denmark. The theme for this year's congress was "Change& Continuity", and ARC contributed with 12 presentations, 7 posters, and with The National E-infrastructure for Aging Research (NEAR) as a sponsor.

One of KI’s largest international collaborations is with Makerere University in Uganda. In time for Makerere’s 100th anniversary, the partnership is to manifest itself in a Centre of Excellence for Sustainable Health. A delegation from KI travelled in May to Uganda to cement the relationship.

The conferment ceremony in Stockholm City Hall on 29 April celebrated Karolinska Institutet’s new doctors of medicine and honorary doctors HRH Prince Daniel, Dr Soumya Swaminathan and Professor Shinhiro Takeda. The ceremony was attended by HRH Crown Princess Victoria, the municipal council chairperson and the Indian and Japanese ambassadors, along with the proud supervisors and families of the new PhDs. The ceremony was infused with the importance of working together towards better health for al

In May, KI held a seminar on academic freedom and international collaborations. The event explored the question of how research is impacted by a world that is characterized by war, conflict and democratic decline. It is not enough to develop new guidelines; actions need to be based on personal responsibility, says KI President Ole Petter Ottersen.

Are you going to study abroad this autumn? We are looking for new students who will go on an exchange semester during the autumn of 2022 and want to blog for KI about their exchange to inspire more students to do the same.