Science Faculty Magazine No. 2 2016 - ENG by Faculty of Science - University of Gothenburg

She studies pilings along Västlänken

Is basic research useless research?

SCIENCE FACULTY No 2 2016 The Faculty of Science

MARINE ROBOTS OPEN UP NEW OPPORTUNITIES South African Sebastiaan Swart will help Sweden develop autonomous measurement instruments to see how the oceans are doing

MAGAZINE

EDITORIAL SCIENCE FACULTY MAGAZINE Science Faculty Magazine is for those interested in the University of Gothenburg and in particular the work at the Faculty of Science.

EDITOR Camilla Persson Phone: +46-31-786 9869 E-mail: camilla.persson@science.gu.se

EDITORIAL STAFF Carina Eliasson Robert Karlsson Tanja Thompson

PUBLISHER

Gustav Bertilsson Uleberg

LAYOUT

Camilla Persson

COVER

Researcher Sebastiaan Swart Photo: Malin Arnesson

ADDRESS

University of Gothenburg Faculty Office of Science Box 460 405 30 Göteborg Sweden E-mail: info@science.gu.se

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We hope you will enjoy this glance into the Faculty of Science. The Science Faculty Magazine’s target group ranges from Faculty staff and alumni to business and industry, public actors and politicians with an interest in mathematics and the natural sciences.

his issue of Science Faculty Magazine examines the perennial question of the balance between basic and applied research. Both are important, but we have to nurture curiosity-driven research today to solve the future’s difficult, complex questions, issues that we might not be able to foresee today. GLOBAL SOCIETAL challenges present complex issues

requiring the ability to work in an interdisciplinary fashion. Researchers with strong disciplinary expertise are well positioned for this. We should make the most of this while continuing to amass knowledge without requiring that it be of direct benefit. PROFESSOR MATTHIAS KAISER spoke at the Faculty Day on the theme Visiting the Integrity of Science: Finding the Signs of Decay or the Reminders of Quality? and promoted the idea of ‘slow research’. Time for reflection and gathering around interesting issues are important in ever-increasing directed research. THE UNIVERSITY OF GOTHENBURG and Chalmers Uni-

versity of Technology have jointly formed the Gothenburg Centre for Advanced Studies in Science and Technology, GoCAS. Using a chair programme, the centre provides an opportunity to come together for a limited time around a fundamental question and shed light on it from different points of departure and scientific disciplines. Interaction and discussion among researchers who can completely focus on the same question offer opportunities for more in-depth understanding.

www.sciencefacultymagazine.com OFTEN MATHEMATICS IS regarded as pure basic sci-

ence, but it is used in most natural science disciplines. Algebra was the subject of the 2016 Faculty Research Award, and, despite the subject’s abstract nature, the award winner was able to put her research in a context that could be understood by a broader public — impressive. It’s important to be able to pass on knowledge

SCIENCE FACULTY MAGAZINE DECEMBER 2016

PORTRÄTT to the younger generation. This issues includes an example of this, where the focus is on a historical and didactic perspective on algebra education. MODERN TECHNOLOGY IS being used today to recreate

churches from the time when Christianity came to Sweden. It’s possible to ‘see’ behind the surface layers and digitally build up church interiors in three dimensions. This is basic research in both the human and natural sciences, and it emphasises the significance of theory and practice. It will be interesting to see what we can learn from history and how this knowledge can be utilised to create a better world.

A historical perspective on algebra education

THE HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE is also particularly

important with the start of the major excavation for the Västlänken rail tunnel in Gothenburg. During excavations, the pilings on which the city is built will be exposed, allowing researchers to examine how they are doing. WE CAN READ about the 2016 jubilee doctor, an emi-

Marine master’s students design their own expedition

History becomes reality with digital tools

nently dedicated person, who, to my great joy, presents electrochemistry as a fascinating field with the potential to contribute to more environmentally friendly production techniques. AT THE TIME OF THIS WRITING, the government’s re-

search bill for the next 10 years has been introduced. It envisions Sweden becoming one of the world’s leading research and innovation countries. This requires ‘both basic research of high quality and excellence and strong research disciplines, but also good preconditions for multidisciplinary research and the creation of an environment that offers potential for new and unexpected combinations and collaborations’. This sounds promising and links back to the important balance between basic and applied research. A NEW YEAR IS in the making and I wish you all pleasant reading and a creative 2017.

Elisabet Ahlberg, Dean Tibetan hotspot

SCIENCE FACULTY MAGAZINEresearch DECEMBER 2016 for climate

FORSKNING

In new home port One of Sebastiaan Swart’s dreams as a scientist is to reveal secrets that the Antarctic Ocean hides under its ice. In the immediate future he will work on developing new data collection methods such as robots in Swedish waters.

n August Sebastiaan Swart left sunny Cape Town to move with his family to a darker and chilly Gothenburg. He is an oceanographer and a specialist in gliders, small robots programmed to travel around in the ocean collecting data that is transmitted via satellite back to the researchers. He notes that we need a lot more knowledge about the oceans and processes there to understand phenomena such as what causes climate change.

SCIENCE FACULTY MAGAZINE DECEMBER 2016

‘One of the greatest difficulties with predicting climate is that we don’t know enough about what is going on in the ocean. For example, how it emits or absorbs heat from the atmosphere and how the exchange of CO2 between the ocean and the atmosphere occurs.’ SEBASTIAAN SWART HAS been named a Wallenberg Academy Fellow, a very desirable career programme for young promising

PROFILE researchers, and for five years he will work at the Department of Marine Sciences at the University of Gothenburg. An important mission during his time in Sweden is to develop the technical capacity to produce high-quality marine data, and this involves procuring and introducing gliders. ‘The first one can be in place as early as April, and we already are planning now to use it in the Skagerrak. A glider that collects dust is not a good glider. It should be in the water. Sweden has no such robots and has fallen behind compared with other countries.’ Swart believes this may be due in part to the fact that Sweden is close to the surrounding sea, and therefore it is not very complicated to conduct research via ship. HIS HOME BASE IS at the University of Cape Town, and he has participated in more than 10 expeditions to Antarctica and the Antarctic Ocean. One problem for researchers there is that the sea is partly covered with ice so little is known about the waters under the ice. ‘It’s hard to make observations because ice blocks the water, instruments fail to work and things break down. Ships can’t stay there for a long time or may not get there at all, and satellites cannot see the water because of the ice.’

But gliders can get to places that are hard to reach by ship. There are two types: those that dive 1,000 metres into the depths of the ocean and come up again, and those that go across the surface at a speed of 2 knots. They can be out for months at a time, which means that they can cover huge areas and measure everything from temperature and wind velocity to salinity, carbon dioxide content and oxygen content. Consequently, they can gather vast amounts of data. And they are comparatively cheap. ‘It costs as much to provide one icebreaking ship with fuel for a month as to buy eight gliders. But ships also are needed to place or retrieve gliders and for measurements that gliders can’t make.’ The biggest challenges gliders face is that mussels love to fasten on them and that they can be subjected to attacks by sharks or the curiosity of seals. SEBASTIAAN SWART ALSO is active in the SOOS, Southern Ocean Observing System, a global research organisation founded five years ago. Its purpose is to coordinate research on ecosystems in the ocean around Antarctica under one umbrella rather than having each country operate its own projects.

SEBASTIAAN SWART Family: wife and son soon to be age 2. Age: 33. Important in life: going to yoga at least twice a week. Interests: scuba diving, cross-country running and travelling: ‘we take our son to cool places’. Most recently in Sri Lanka. Reads: biographies, a favourite being Nelson Mandela’s autobiography Long Walk to Freedom. Last read book is a nonfiction book about a multi-day race by Indians in the Amazon. SCIENCE FACULTY MAGAZINE DECEMBER 2016

Swart was very surprised when he realised that no scientific study of oceanographic observations in the Skagerrak had been published since 1997. Only modelling calculations have been done. ‘It’s shocking! That’s the word I want to use. It is astonishing that there have not been more observations in waters that are so important for Sweden. We must have observations to see if the models are correct.’ SWARD ANTICIPATES A very bright future here. He envisages Sweden becoming a world

leader in marine technology and would like to see a Swedish fleet of marine robots of various types within a few years. In the immediate future, he is hoping for a month-long data collection in the Skagerrak next summer where temperature, salinity, oxygen content, plankton concentration, currents and other factors will be measured. ‘It would be extremely valuable and reveal much about small-scale variations in Skagerrak oceanography.’ TEXT HELENA ÖSTLUND PHOTO MALIN ARNESSON

”A fantastic opportunity for Sweden” Wallenberg Academy Fellows is a career programme in which the most promising young researchers in all disciplines receive funding to develop their research on a long-term basis. The goal is to give promising young researchers the opportunity to focus on their research and tackle difficult and long-term research issues. Every year about 30 new fellows are chosen after being nominated by universities and evaluated by participating academies. Some are active at the nominating university, while others, like Sebastiaan Swart, are based at a university or research institute abroad. ANNA WÅHLIN IS A professor of oceanography at the University of Gothenburg and will be working with Sebastiaan Swart. Marine research is facing a major change with the methods used to monitor the oceans. New discoveries have shown that variations in the ocean occur on much smaller scales than has been recognised up to now, which means that the amount of measurements must increase. ’We need to move away from dependence on large research vessels, which are a very limited resource, and shift to a much higher degree to autonomous measurement platforms, such as the gliders which Sebastiaan

has specialised in’, Wåhlin says. ‘This development is rapidly gaining ground in the rest of the world, but so far Sweden has lagged behind.’ SHE TELLS US THAT they “were aiming for the stars” when they asked if Sebastiaan could imagine applying and were both happy and surprised when he agreed to. The fact that he then became one of ten 2015 Wallenberg Academy Fellows in science in Sweden and is now located in Gothenburg is extremely positive. ‘This is a fantastic opportunity for Sweden and the University of Gothenburg in particular. It will be the start of a new era in Sweden now that we have access to the autonomous measurement techniques that are so vitally important for the future and for developing a modern measurement tradition in Sweden.’ TEXT CAMILLA PERSSON

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NEWS NEW DISCOVERY ABOUT FEMALE INFERTILITY AND OVARIAN CANCER

Bushes are more widely distributed than trees Bushes are more widely distributed in nature and on earth than trees. A new study explains why bushes are so successful worldwide. The key is their many stems. This increases both growth and survival rate compared with trees, according to researchers at the University of Gothenburg, Chalmers University of Technology and Linnaeus University. Bushes with flowers and berries are popular in our gardens and parks, and in the wild they have a global distribution significantly larger than trees. They are present on at least 40 per cent of the Earth’s land surface, while trees occupy only 28 per cent of the land area. Still, few have attempted to understand bushes as a plant form.

Large greenhouse gas emissions from forests on drained peat soil Forests typically are regarded as a carbon sink for greenhouse gases. But researchers at the Department of Earth Sciences can now show that forests growing on drained peatland emit large amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere over a forest’s life span of 80 years. In Sweden forests on drained wetland cover 1.2 million hectares, which represents 5 per cent of productive forest land in Sweden. Forests absorb carbon dioxide and thereby mitigate the increase of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. But when former wetlands are drained to make room for forests, organic material stored in the soil breaks down, causing huge emissions of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

Why can some women have children when they are 50 years old while others cannot have children when they are 30? A new study from the University of Gothenburg contributes a piece of the puzzle for a better understanding of the issue. Female egg cells have a ‘magical’ switch that turns on when the eggs are ripe, according to Kui Liu, a professor in the Department of Chemistry and Molecular Biology.

RESEARCHERS WARN OF ENVIRONMENTAL DISASTER In an open letter to Science magazine, researchers warn of the risks posed by oil drilling in the Great Lakes region of East Africa. ‘We believe that the dangers of oil extraction are greatly underestimated’, says Ola Svensson, one of the 70 researchers behind the letter. It is important for the public to become aware of the advanced plans for oil extraction in the Great Lakes region, the researchers said. ‘Things that happen far away often end up under the radar. We’re able to read about oil extraction through fracking in the United States but not about the planned oil extraction in the Great Lakes region in Africa.’ SCIENCE FACULTY MAGAZINE DECEMBER 2016

BASIC RESEARCH AT THE CENTRE It’s often said that without curiosity-driven basic research, we wouldn’t have a Nobel Prize. Among those committed to basic research are researchers in the centre of expertise and research known as GoCAS, Gothenburg Centre for Advanced Studies in Science and Technology. GoCAS is a collaboration between the University of Gothenburg and Chalmers University of Technology.

esearch today is largely about applications, and when researchers are asked to tell about their research, the question that often arises is ‘and what will the research be used for?’ But we don’t always know exactly how research results can be used in the future. ‘Basic research is long-term and driven by curiosity, not because there is a direct application around the corner,’ says Gun-

nar Nyman, professor of chemistry and vice director of GoCAS. The Gothenburg Centre for Advanced Studies in Science and Technology was inaugurated in May 2015. The idea is that the centre will act as a network for researchers who are engaged in basic research, but within different disciplines. In addition to chemists like Gunnar, physicists, mathematicians, computer scientists and biologists are associated

with GoCAS. One of the centre’s main purposes is to create a meeting place for researchers, not only from the two universities in Gothenburg, but Gunnar Nyman, vice director of also for foreign GoCAS researchers. To this end, the centre has a chair programme, where a renowned researcher is invited to serve as a chair and leads seminars and other gatherings for several weeks. ‘A chair is to be an eminent researcher in his or her field who, in turn, invites additional people. The aim is to enable researchers from different backgrounds to get together around a problem’, Nyman says. Leonardo Testi, an Italian astrophysicist, was the centre’s first chair (see article on page 10). There are plans for additional guests in 2017, including evolutionary biologist Scott Edwards, who is coming here from Harvard in the spring. Karin Hårding, a researcher at the University of Gothenburg, will be his host. ‘It’s really great that we are getting Scott Edwards to come here, and I hope it will give us inspiration and energy’, Karin Hårding says. ‘It will be wonderful to dive deep into basic research in the spring.’

Her hope is that the visit will bring together mathematicians, physicists and biologists from various disciplines in a natural way. ‘I also hope that it will result in some scientific articles.’ In the autumn of 2017, the chair programme ‘Existential Risk to Humanity’ is scheduled to take place, with risk researcher Anders Sandberg from the University of Oxford as an invited guest. The aim is to investigate how existential risks — that is, risks that threaten not only our generation but the whole of humanity — arise and how they can be prevented. These can be risks that originate in nature, but also to an ever-increasing extent, those that humans create themselves. Moreover, many of the risks are linked directly to areas where future progress could provide huge gains, such as biotechnology, nanotechnology and artificial intelligence, which makes it even more complicated. Mathematician Olle Häggström will host the programme. ‘This type of issue is inevitably interdisciplinary and requires not only scientific expertise about risks and how they can be prevented, but also knowledge in fields such as economics, international politics, security and philosophy. Something that also will be noteworthy among the participants in the programme.’ TEXT CAMILLA PERSSON PHOTO MALIN ARNESSON

GOTHENBURG CENTRE FOR ADVANCED STUDIES IN SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY The Centre is a joint effort between Chalmers University of Technology and the University of Gothenburg and aims to stimulate collaboration between researchers from different fields with an interest in fundamental questions. The Centre aims to strengthen basic research by promoting

an open and stimulating research environment and ensuring that basic research is a visible and integral part of research at Chalmers University of Technology and the University of Gothenburg.

SCIENCE FACULTY MAGAZINE DECEMBER 2016

European researchers gathered to discuss the origin of planets Some 30 researchers from throughout Europe attended the Origins of Habitable Planets programme arranged by the Gothenburg Centre for Advanced Studies in Science (GoCAS). The programme examined the circumstances under which planets form with the right conditions for life to occur.

he programme was led and organised by Leonardo Testi, a scientist at the European Southern Observatory

(ESO). ‘Leonardo Testi’s well-established network and eye for the big overarching issues enabled researchers from different fields to meet here in Gothenburg and focus on how pieces of the puzzle that represent individual research projects can be fit together into a whole’, says Eva Wirström, assistant professor at Chalmers University of Technology, which was co-organiser and the local scientific host for the programme.

Leonardo Testi

SCIENCE FACULTY MAGAZINE DECEMBER 2016

Both established experts and younger scientists in areas such as astronomy, chemistry, planetary formation and radio astronomical instrumentation took part in the Origins of Habitable Planets programme. About 40 per cent of the researchers were women. The current programme, which linked astronomy with physics and chemistry, spanned six weeks, and scientists spent from one to two weeks in attendance. Professor Testi feels that the GoCAS programme was a big success. ’Bringing together a diverse group of people and focusing on a big and important issue was very effective’, he says. THE MAIN QUESTION was how common, or uncommon, it really is for planets to form under just the right conditions for life to evolve — something that we only know has occurred here on Earth. ’We also discussed how our observatories need to be improved to allow us to be better equipped to investigate how Earth-like planets form around stars’, says Eva Wirström. About 80 scientists from around the world came for the two smaller conferences about instrumentation included in the Origins of Habitable Planets programme. In addition, about 30 local scientists took part in some of the programme topics.

Professor Testi believes that GoCAS was a perfect environment for these discussions. ‘There were excellent opportunities for both large discussions and small group sessions’, he says. ‘Moreover, being located in the Chalmers area made it easy for local scientific groups to meet. I also appreciated the social activities that took place outside of the regular programme, particularly the trip in the archipelago.’ ’The highlight for me personally was the discussions with chemists, physicists and astronomers on how life’s molecules can form in the early stages of star and planet formation’, Eva Wirström says. ‘I learned a lot that was new, especially about the specific challenges science faces in seeking to get more precise answers to these questions.’ SHE BELIEVES THAT the new

contacts created among scientists from different disciplines can move developments forward in interesting and unexpected directions. ‘The intense focus on these issues ultimately presented a much clearer picture of what we actually know at present, and possible ways forward crystallised’, Wirström says. Leonardo Testi praises the logistics and the equipment provided. ‘It was perfect’, he says. ‘We have the organisers to thank for a large part of the success of the GoCAS programme. GoCAS was a very productive setting in which to discuss these scientific issues.’ TEXT CARINA ELIASSON PHOTO M.MCCAUGHREAN (ESA)/ESO

PERSPECTIVES ON MATHEMATICS It’s not enough to be good at calculation to successfully complete the master’s programme in the mathematical sciences. Since 2013, parts of the programme have also included required philosophy and history classes. ‘The aim is to provide a historical, cultural and philosophical perspective on mathematics’, says instructor and mathematician Ulf Persson. The course Perspectives on Mathematics runs parallel with other courses throughout the autumn semester. It mostly follows chronological order, starting with the ancient Greeks, and deals with both mathematicians of antiquity, including Euclid and Archimedes, and the more modern Newton, Euler and Gauss. Persson puts great emphasis on describing the historical context and engaging in dialogue with the students. ‘I am struck by how little they know about history, and for that reason alone, I find that the course has an important mission of broadening the mind.’ Much of the course is based on encouraging students to contemplate and discuss the objectives and purposes of mathematics and its relationship to the natural sciences. Persson stresses that whether the course will be rewarding largely depends on the students’ own commitment and willingness to take part in class discussions. The fact that the programme is international and the course is in English can sometimes inhibit students in discussing issues. It is, however, apparent that this type of course is important. Certainly, the teacher believes this: ’I think there’s a definite need to allow opportunities for wide-ranging reflection among students, especially when courses tend to be so specialised. TEXT CAMILLA PERSSON

SCIENCE FACULTY MAGAZINE DECEMBER 2016

PROFILE

Searching the past for future answers Mathematics researcher Johanna Pejlare wants to understand why Swedish school pupils’ test result curves in algebra are trending downwards. To assist her, she has 300-year-old textbooks, among other things.

hree large paper tomes lay on a table in Johanna Pejlare’s office. Both the front page and the contents are printed in an ornate German typeface, and one of the books is written in Latin. ‘I’m a bit extreme’, she says, smiling. ‘They are transcriptions of books that are based on the lectures of the 18th century mathematician Duhre and a transcription of Euclid’s the third century BC Elements from a 17th century edition by mathematician Gestrinius. The heavy volumes, in more ways than one, will be used by Pejlare in the research project that she helped launch in the spring 2016, which is funded by the Swedish Research Council. Along with some of her colleagues from her days as a doctoral student, she will spend four years studying historical and educational perspectives on algebra education in school. ‘We want to contribute to the dialogue about the problems involved in implementing algebra in school mathematics’, Pejlare says. ‘International studies indicate that Swedish students’ knowledge of algebra is not good, and we want to find out why that is the case and what can be done about it.’ SINCE THE SPRING of 2015, she has been employed at the Department of Mathe-

SCIENCE FACULTY MAGAZINE DECEMBER 2016

matical Sciences. The journey there has not been straightforward. Initially, Pejlare studied archaeology, but via some elective courses in mathematics, she decided on that subject instead. ‘When I finished my master’s degree, I saw that the Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences was going to start a doctoral school in mathematics that focused on education. I applied for a doctoral studentship and got it. It wasn’t according to a plan, you see’, she says, laughing. ‘But I’ve always tried to do what seems to me to be exciting and challenging.’ WITHIN THE FRAMEWORK of the doctoral

school, she took a course in mathematics history, felt that it was the subject she wanted to work with, and since then her research field has been mathematics, with a focus on the history of mathematics and education. ‘It’s a very exciting area. It combines so many different themes that interest me, such as history, mathematics and the philosophy of mathematics. How has mathematics evolved into what it is today? Why do we have the mathematical concepts we do, and how have they evolved into the way they look today?’

Pejlare spends part of her time on the Pedagogen Campus where she teaches basic mathematics to future teachers. ‘Sometimes I wish that I had had even more time for research. But the students, and above all their prospective pupils, are what is most important. I always put them first.’

She received her PhD in 2008 at Uppsala University with a dissertation that, among other things, deals with the visualisations of mathematics throughout history. After a few years at the University of Borås, a position in Gothenburg was announced that fit her perfectly. She applied and got it, and almost two years ago she moved into her office at Campus Johanneberg.

JOHANNA PEJLARE Profession: researcher in mathematics history and didactics Age: 40 years Family: husband Michael, also a mathematician, and children Alexander and Isolde Lives in: Gothenburg Leisure time: ’Devote a lot of time to the family, like to go on outings — the sculpture park at Pilane on Tjörn and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark, are two favourites.’

Johanna Pejlare is critical of the simplistic way in which the history of mathematics often is applied didactically, where the starting point is an assumption that the mathematical concepts we use today have been developed by and for us in a specific, orderly fashion. She maintains that there are many examples of how different cultural contexts have influenced the historical development of mathematical concepts, causing them go in different directions. ‘Take negative numbers, for example. In the West, development of a full understanding of negative numbers was a long and complicated process, but in China people understood what they are and how they work very early. So it becomes difficult to draw parallels between the historical development and students’ conceptual development. Which narrative should we choose in that case?’ TEXT ROBERT KARLSSON PHOTO MALIN ARNESSON

SCIENCE FACULTY MAGAZINE DECEMBER 2016

Concerted effort to address global challenges ‘Today’s risk assessments of chemicals are inadequate. It is not enough to look at only one chemical at a time. This practice is based on the idea that the environment is free from other chemicals, which is a major simplification of a reality in which many chemicals are present at the same time’, says Professor Thomas Backhaus, director of the Centre for Future Chemical Risk Assessment and Management Strategies.

ackhaus argues that the toxic effect is greater for mixtures than for individual chemicals because they interact. He notes a problem in the current regulatory system. Scientists at the research centre are looking for tools and alternatives that will make it possible to extend the current regulatory system, such as through special taxes on

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chemicals, additional information campaigns or voluntary measures. ‘We are currently analysing Swedish experience with hazardous chemicals, such as the fat solvent trichloroethylene, and experience with biocides from other countries. The goal is better management of chemicals and to help facilitate the replacement of hazardous

chemicals with less problematic options in consumer products. To succeed with this, we need closer collaboration with project stakeholders, such as government agencies, experts in the field, students, industry and the public. THE GREATEST CHALLENGE

when it comes to interaction with stakeholders is ensuring that our work is relevant to them and that we create an open and secure arena where thoughts and ideas can be developed at a natural pace. Our advisory group will be an important part of our work. It is composed of experts from different disciplines and work environments and complements the expertise of people working on the project.’ THE CENTRE IS PART of the University of Gothenburg’s commitment to research related to global societal challenges. The university is investing SEK 300 million in interdisciplinary research over a six-year period. Deliang Chen, Assistant Dean for Research at the Faculty of Science, believes that a multidisciplinary approach is necessary to create the right conditions for taking on this kind of issue. ‘The global societal challenges we are grappling with today are very complex and touch on interconnected issues in areas such as climate, water, food supplies and biodiversity’, Chen says. ‘At the same time, science is divided into different disciplines that deal with different aspects of these issues, which means that a holistic approach is lacking. Tackling these challenges in a systematic and integrated way requires new working methods and approaches in research.’ THOMAS BACKHAUS ARGUES that the multidisciplinary approach offers good opportunities for new insights because you are forced

to look beyond your own discipline. At the same time, it presents several challenges. ‘One is learning each other’s language and understanding the specific problems confronting different disciplines. Another is designing case studies, outreach and educational efforts that benefit each participant from a rather diverse group of researchers.’ CHEN HOPES THAT the research within the initiative will help solve global problems. ‘At the same time, I would like to point out that there is much other interesting research within the university that directly or indirectly contributes to sustainable development in the world. An example of this is the Gothenburg Global Biodiversity Centre, which will be established on January 1, 2017. The loss of biodiversity is another important societal challenge, and alleviating it will require great commitment and collaboration.’

TEXT TANJA THOMPSON ILLUSTRATION KICKI EDGREN

UGOT CHALLENGES Over a six-year period, the University of Gothenburg is investing SEK 300 million in interdisciplinary research related to global societal challenges. After an extensive application and selection process, six projects were granted funds within the framework known as UGOT Challenges. • • • • • •

The Centre for Antibiotic Resistance Research The Centre for Future Chemical Risk Assessment and Management Strategies The Centre for Collective Action Research The Centre for Critical Heritage Studies The Swedish Mariculture Research Centre The Centre for Ageing and Health

SCIENCE FACULTY MAGAZINE DECEMBER 2016

EDUCATION

Master’s students lead marine project Carrying out a marine project from start to finish and planning and implementing an expedition with the Skagerak research vessel has been a challenge for master’s students in the course Marine Project – From Idea to Action. ‘This masters course is different from previous courses I attended at the University of Gothenburg and more focused on leveraging our knowledge and ability to work independently’, says Fredrik Ryderheim, one of the 18 master’s students taking the course.

t’s the final seminar and day of the presentation. Master’s students at the 15-credit course is gathered in a classroom at the Earth Sciences Centre, facing each other and instructor David Turner, talk about results and experiences from the marine project they designed and implemented. Before the final part of the course, the students were divided into three groups. Each group has been out with Skagerak examining the condition of Byfjorden and Havstensfjorden.

WITH THE AID of graphics and pictures, group

after group reports on the methods and results from test samplings they had prepared in advance and then performed in Byfjor-

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den and Havstensfjorden during one day in October. A steady stream of questions and answers in the classroom. All the students take part in the discussion of structures, methods and ways of evaluating the results. ‘The master’s students have planned their projects themselves’, says David Turner, professor of marine chemistry. ‘Each group has had use of Skagerak during a full day and has taken about 50 water samples in Byfjorden and Havstensfjorden. They told the captain where he should go and where water samples were to be taken.’ AN ACCOUNT OF THE projects has already

appeared in the formal group reports, which

highlighted the project planning, samplings, calculations and analyses of what worked well and what worked less well. But individual scientific reports have also been submitted. And the written reports have been supplemented with oral statements. WHEN THE LAST GROUP reported on its project and the PowerPoint was turned off, a faint aroma of coffee wafted into the classroom. Time for ‘fika’, a coffee break with sandwiches, and a discussion about the course as a whole gets started. Almost half the students are from other countries. Artemis Karlatou Charalampopoulou is from Greece. She appreciates the way the course links the education with outside society. ‘It has been very exciting to work together on the research vessel, but it has also been valuable to learn how we can partner with businesses and government agencies. We’ve visited SMHI (the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute) and the County Administrative Board, but I would have liked additional study trips.’

Students Fredrik Ryderheim and Artemis Karlatou Charalampopoulou both appreciate the way the course links the education with outside society. One of several conclusions the students reached is that Havstensfjorden is saltier in its depths than Byfjorden and also richer in oxygen.

During the first part of the course, each project group had a mentor to turn to. It’s the second time the master’s course Marine Project – From Idea to Action has been offered, and David Turner feels the mentor portion is something that can be improved. The students have found that it has been difficult for the mentors to be available when necessary. Otherwise, they are happy with the way the course was structured. ‘It’s refreshing to not only have the lectures. The course also has given me ideas for my master’s thesis’, one of the students says. TURNER IS GLAD that the course has become

so international. ‘Our aim was to also attract international students. About half of all master’s students have been enrolled in our undergraduate programme, but the remainder come from countries such as Germany, England and Vietnam.’ Master’s student Frederick Ryderheim has previously taken courses at other universities. ‘The most fun thing we did when I studied ecology in Lund was a trip to the forest. Here I spent a week on Tjärnö island and one in Kristineberg, and now I’ve gone on an expedition with Skagerak. You learn a lot, and I feel very privileged.’ TEXT & PHOTO CARINA ELIASSON PHOTO MALIN ARNESSON

SCIENCE FACULTY MAGAZINE DECEMBER 2016

FORSKNING

Kr isti a

Po h

Basic research = useless research?

ot o

This column represents reflections from a limited horizon — my horizon. I am a professor of inorganic chemistry at the Royal Institute of Technology and secretary general for Natural and Engineering Sciences at the Swedish Research Council. In the event that you don’t know what inorganic chemistry is, the subject was called mineral chemistry in Berzelius’ day and encompasses essentially the chemical elements, all 118 known ones and some hypothetical ones.

received my PhD at Lund University in 1990 and have been active in research and teaching at the university since then, at times abroad. The circumstances for conducting independent and long-term research in a fundamental scientific subject such as inorganic chemistry have changed radically since 1990. For at least 15 years, my research projects have become increasingly applied. That’s where external financing is available. When I and some colleagues in a collaborative project recently discussed a joint future research strategy, one of my younger colleagues stated that we must ‘go where the money is’. And this probably is a more or less explicit strategy for most of us in the academic world today. In this context, we can also attest that the number of teachers/ researchers active in the field of inorganic chemistry in Sweden today is only a fraction of the number in 1990. IN 2010 INORGANIC CHEMISTRY at the Royal

Institute of Technology was lumped together

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with some other departments of basic chemical subjects into the Department of Applied Physical Chemistry. We had all become far too few to be able to manage the administration required by a department, and we represented scientific environments that were far too small to offer a creative research environment for our younger colleagues. Was this the last department of inorganic chemistry in Sweden to go to the grave? LAST SUMMER I TOOK PART in the Inorganic Days organised by the Swedish Chemistry Society and noted, to my initial surprise, that this conference attracted close to 200 participants. Where did all of them come from? After a while I realised that more research in inorganic chemistry is indeed being conducted in the country today than ever, but that most practitioners neither identify themselves nor the research they do as inorganic chemistry. You might think that it’s great that knowledge from a fundamental subject can be applied in a variety of other

GUEST COLUMN

areas. But what happens in the long term if the scientific foundation disappears and the knowledge frontier in inorganic chemistry as a subject in its own right is not advanced? Does the funding of more applied aspects of inorganic chemistry allow us to also follow up important fundamental questions? PREVIOUSLY INSTITUTIONS of higher educa-

tion stood as guarantors for ensuring that fundamental subjects could be developed scientifically and that knowledge could be conveyed through education at a higher level. Today, all of us who work at institutions of higher learning are fully dependent on external funding, and the term ‘faculty funding’ has essentially lost its meaning at many of these institutions. Because teaching also is underfunded in a subject such as chemistry, where laboratories, the necessary staffing levels for laboratory tutorials and chemicals constitute a significant cost, no chemistry teacher makes a living only by teaching. Given that all external calls for proposals are associated with cut-throat competition and moreover have a maximum time horizon of 4-5 years, you might wonder what kind of research is being fostered in Sweden today. Do we have the requisite conditions to conduct long-term scientific research that has only new knowledge as an objective? IN 1992 I HAD THE benefit of doing post-doctorate research in the United States at Cornell University under the guidance of Roald Hoffmann. Cornell University and Roald’s research group were characterised by incredible scientific vigour and creativity, which left no colleague untouched. I again visited Cornell University in 2013 to participate in a symposium in honour of Roald in connection

with his 75th birthday. I was again struck by the scientific impact a large American university has. Roald gave a touching speech about his upbringing and career and took the opportunity to thank all those who influenced him on his scientific journey. He closed with a thank you to Cornell University with the words: ‘Thank you, Cornell University, for always allowing me to pursue interesting, but not necessarily important, research over all the years.’ OBVIOUSLY, INTERESTING RESEARCH goes a

long way; Roald is a Nobel laureate and one of the most highly cited scientist of our time, and his theoretical insights have shaped a whole generation of chemists’ views on chemical bonding. For example, many advances in organic synthesis, which led to new and literally life-altering medicines, would not have been possible without the fundamental insights that his research generated. Would it be possible to conduct this type of research in Sweden today? IF WE SHIFT from basic chemistry to basic astronomy, astronomy is a more purely knowledge-oriented subject. An understanding of how galaxies or stars are constructed, for example, is difficult to translate into ’useful’ products. My friends in astronomy usually address such questions by referring to side effects, such as developments in optics and image processing that have pivotal and important consequences in other areas, such as medical diagnosis. ONE CAN COMPARE the spin-off effects to

the development of the World Wide Web at CERN or new materials that were developed in the Apollo programme. These are SCIENCE FACULTY MAGAZINE DECEMBER 2016

important, but the basic purpose of astronomical research is not primarily a matter of instrument development; if anything, that is the tool. Of course, knowledge gained from research in astronomy is absolutely crucial for long-term and strategic standpoints that affect people in the world, even if they all too often are challenged by non-scientific beliefs. Can we afford to not support pure knowledge-centred research? Can we afford to not want to know? A FEW YEARS AGO The Royal Swedish

Academy of Sciences issued a publication about the value of basic research that cited a number of examples of achievements in our modern society that would not have been possible if it were not for the basic knowledge that already existed. Often this knowledge had been acquired several decades earlier, and at that time there was no clear ‘benefit’ to be gained from the new insights. Herein lies part of the educational challenge for all basic research: pointing to a possible benefit far in the future always comes off badly against the argument about a benefit today or promises to cure your illness now or to create a new commercial opportunity today. We see an increasingly clear focus on the societal challenges we can identify today; talk about challenge-driven research has become a mantra. Curiously enough, scientists at institutions of higher learning are generally regarded as separated from society and as if they had never heard of the challenges humanity faces. WHEN A COLLEAGUE was asked if the Swedish Research Council ever supported any research with relevance to a very topical challenge for Sweden and Europe, a quick search showed that the council in recent years has spent about SEK 250 million on basic research within the area in question. The myth of university researchers living in ivory towers has been dead for a long time,

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but the rumour stubbornly lives on. Today all researchers are an integral part of society, and they educate a large part of society’s young people using current knowledge as a base. Could we perhaps attain better and more creative research results by supporting free but challenge-relevant research rather than by controlling it with challenge-driven initiatives locked into today’s level of knowledge? MY DISCUSSION ABOVE relates, of course, to the perennial debate about the balance between applied (challenge-driven) research and basic (useless) research. Both types of research are needed! A good balance between the two is also important, and in Sweden today we seem to be lacking someone who is able to take responsibility for this balance. Universities no longer possess the wherewithal for assuming such responsibilities. My discussion above can, of course, be interpreted as a lament over bygone times, but I see it more as a well-founded concern that we (society) are no longer prepared to devote adequate resources to building a knowledge base for the future: the knowledge we convey to young people through education and the knowledge that must be the basis for decisions at many levels of our society. As our society becomes increasingly complex and technical, it also becomes increasingly important that all of us — and especially our leaders — have a current knowledge base to lean against when important decisions have to be made.

Lars Kloo Professor of Inorganic Chemistry at the Royal Institute of Technology and Secretary General in Natural and Engineering Sciences at the Swedish Research Council.

The rorqual whale in Ystad becomes an object of research The rorqual whale that was found in the Baltic Sea and then was submerged a few miles off the coast of Ystad has now become an object of unique research.

ecuring the whale cadaver and then transporting it out into open water was no easy task. The whale was in a stage of putrefaction, and its size meant that dealing with it posed a great challenge. The submersion was a complex operation. But at the end of August this year, the rorqual whale was sunk 3.5 nautical miles off the coast of Ystad next to a shipwreck. ‘Submerging a nine-metre-long whale is never easy, of course’, says Department of Marine Sciences researcher Thomas Dahlgren. ‘This one was incredibly buoyant, and a large measure of both cunning and scrap iron was required to get it down on the bottom. In nature, a dead whale drifts around for a long time before it eventually sinks.’ TOGETHER WITH BJÖRN KÄLLSTRÖM, a

research colleague at the same department, Dahlgren will follow the whale’s decomposition process in the sea. ’Since trawlers at the beginning of the 20th century brought up whale bones from the seabed, we have known that there are animals that are found only on dead whales, such as clams and snails’, says Källström, who was present when the whale was sunk. ‘We’re following the process for some time through amateur divers who visit the site’, Dahlgren says. ‘In the summer we will go down there ourselves and take samples and document it.’

Eutrophication of the seas is a major environmental problem. What animals are naturally capable of living in eutrophicated environments and converting the nutrients is less well known, particularly in the Baltic Sea. The whale cadaver naturally is very rich in nutrients. ‘We will make use of “citizen science” to get data from the whale. We are collaborating with Pdyk, the company that submerged the whale for us. It was Pdyk that found it floating in the sea and towed it in. We also are working with Ystad municipality to inform divers who dive at the wreck where the whale was sunk.’ THE RESEARCHERS WILL ask the divers to

collect information about the temperature and salinity by the whale and ask them to photograph and film the site if they have cameras with them. This will allow the collection of a lot more data while also involving the public. ’We are happy and grateful for the positive response and the interest which residents and authorities have shown in the whale and our research. It will be fun to continue working on this project’, says Dahlgren. TEXT CARINA ELIASSON PHOTO PATRIK JUHLIN

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RESEARCH

Västlänken, or West Link, is a planned railway tunnel under central Gothenburg that will provide the city with through commuter and regional train traffic. The blue lines show the parts of concrete tunnel built in dirt/soil, and the red lines show the parts of tunnel built in rock.

Research for a safe Västlänken Many old buildings are supported by wooden pilings that might have been in place for hundreds of years. On an assignment from the Swedish Transport Administration, Charlotte Björdal will examine pilings from ten sites along the route of the Västlänken railway tunnel. The extent to which they are affected by fungi and bacteria can provide an indication of how stable the buildings are.

ästlänken, or the West Link, is about to be built in Gothenburg, and large underground areas will be exposed. This presents an opportunity to research things that otherwise are difficult to study. The wooden pilings on which the city is built, for example. ‘We have gained access to the Västlänken area to monitor what is happening with the wooden foundation pilings under old buildings’, says Charlotte Björdal, who is a professor at the Department of Marine Sciences. ‘This is a general problem in old cities when new construction is to occur, particularly if it exposes a large area and excavates a large pit. What happens then?’

Along with a doctoral student, she will examine how foundation pilings are affected during construction of this calibre. A critical point is the water table. Wood pilings should be covered with water, and if they are, they can last for several hundreds of years. But during dry periods, the upper part of the piling can dry out and be attacked by bacteria or wood decay fungi. In the event of serious attacks, the pilings weaken and the building can subside. ‘We would like to know how fast this process happens. We don’t know much about that today. We might be exaggerating our unease and believing that it happens all at once. How long can we tolerate a little subsiding of the water table before it affects the pilings?’ IN THE PROJECT ten sites with foundation

pilings will be monitored for several years. It will include both houses and larger buildings when agreed upon with the owners. Reaching the pilings is not a simple proce-

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‘If Gothenburg stands on such fine pilings, nobody needs to be concerned’, says Charlotte Björdal about the pilings sticking up behind Gothenburg Central Station that she took samples from in November.

microorganisms, wooden structures and cultural heritage.’

dure, so there is close collaboration with the Västlänken project. If you are unable to gain access from the outside, you have to enter the basement, make holes in the concrete, find a piling and dig a deep pit. Björdal then goes there to take samples that are studied under a microscope to see if the piling has been attacked, and if so, how much and how far into the wood the incursion has progressed. AT THESE SITES, new, smaller wooden pilings will be dug down, and researchers will monitor what happens after two, four, six years and maybe even longer. They will also measure the water table through pipes in the ground. During the construction period, Västlänken’s contractors will maintain the water level through infiltration of tap water, which has a different oxygen content than groundwater. The question is also whether oxygen content is a factor. ‘Today we can’t say anything about it, because we don’t know. Nobody has gotten to the bottom of it. These are typical interdisciplinary questions. They concern hydrogeology, land, water transport, oxygen,

BJÖRDAL IS A curator at heart. She has a doctorate in wood science and loves wood. She notes that it takes time to learn how to assess the decomposition of wood when you look at it under a microscope. It is not something that can be measured in a simple way. ‘You have to know a lot about what wood looks like when it is healthy, when it is decomposed by fungi, when it is broken down by bacteria and how different woods are affected.’ In November she had the opportunity to take samples on pilings sticking up behind Gothenburg Central Station that had been exposed in connection with construction. It is a large area where an old railway had been and a bit down in the earth a whole system of pilings came into view. ‘Most of the pilings were amazing, as healthy as can be. If Gothenburg stands on such fine pilings, nobody needs to be concerned.’ THERE IS A lot of clay in Gothenburg and that is good for wood. Clay soaks up water and retains it. Therefore, clay and pilings are a perfect blend. Clay can keep pilings strong for several hundred years. She emphasises that the project results will also be applied to other wood, such as archaeological remains that are buried beneath the city. If pilings do not fare well, neither will these objects, which usually are much thinner than stout pilings. ‘This is research that will be a source of joy to many, not only in Sweden but also abroad. No one has previously studied pilings from a research perspective, where you look at how they are affected under a large building. There are a lot of things that we don’t know and we have to find out. Come back in four years, and I hope we will be able explain how it all fits together and how we can make things better.’ TEXT HELENA ÖSTLUND PHOTO CHARLOTTE BJÖRDAL ILLUSTRATION THE SWEDISH TRANSPORT ADMINISTRATION SCIENCE FACULTY MAGAZINE DECEMBER 2016

Digital instruction provides educational gains Blended learning has long been used in countries like Canada, Australia and the United States. Now this teaching method is also being used to a greater extent in Swedish higher education institutions. As part of this effort, an Active Learning Classroom has been recently inaugurated at the Department of Physics.

lended learning refers to a combination of traditional classroom methods and more modern digital activities. Digitally-based teaching might mean that students can practice doing customised exercises on their computers and get instant feedback and answers about whether the syntax is correct – that is, if mathematical symbols, parentheses and so on correlate as well as the solution to the problem. There can also be a common forum on the Web where students and teachers can discuss problems and solutions.

PROFESSOR STELLAN ÖSTLUND at the

Department of Physics has made use of blended learning in courses for several years. He is responsible for programming the students’ exercises.

‘Two years ago everyone sat tinkering on their pocket calculators, but now the students respond through formulas and mathematical expressions and not through numbers’, says Östlund Advantages of digital learning are that students can receive increased feedback and more quickly see the solution to a problem, but the preparatory work on the part of the teacher takes a lot of time, Stellan Östlund feels. ‘It’s important to consider the educational benefits and not regard blended learning as a way to save money’, he says. In a step to augment the opportunities for blended learning, the Department of Physics has recently inaugurated an ALC. ALC, which stands for Active Learning Classroom, is a classroom where the

FACTS ABOUT BLENDED LEARNING AND ACTIVE LEARNING CLASSROOM Blended learning refers to a mixture of in person traditional classroom methods with more modern digital solutions. An arrangement, for example, could involve giving students an assignment on video before a class and spending class time discussing the solution in small groups and with the teacher.

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ALC stands for Active Learning Classroom, a classroom that has been designed specifically for blended learning activities. The environment in the room supports and strengthens student active learning by motivating students to become learning resources for each other. The room is equipped with round tables and there are TV monitors and whiteboards at each table, all to facilitate displaying digital media and promote discussion in various groupings.

physical learning environment and the equipment are optimised to promote more active learning on the part of students. Among other things, this means that all equipment in the department’s classroom is mounted on wheels so that it can be easily moved and that there are TV monitors at each table where students can plug in their computers. The intention is to create a good environment for discussions and problem solving in small groups. MALIN ROSVALL IS engaged in teacher

training to become an instructor of mathematics, physics and technology at the upper level of compulsory school. During her education she has studied courses in modern physics and in environmental physics in the ALC room, where teachers Ingvar Albinsson and Jonas Enger took advantage of the room’s possibilities. ‘The room made it possible for us to carry on discussions in small groups without raising the sound volume too high because we could screen off part of

the room’, she says. ‘We could also do simulations on the computer that could be displayed on a big screen so that everyone in the group could watch the same simulation and discuss various aspect that had an effect or why something turned out as it did.’ IN THE ROOM, each group also has access

to its own whiteboard in case students want to make a note or do calculations together. Malin Rosvall is positive about the arrangement that allows students to view a lecture on video before the class and then work with the material at the assigned class time. ‘That way you have the opportunity to have a discussion with the lecturer and get help with what you find difficult’, she says. ‘Overall, I really think that the ALC room provided an opportunity to learn in new ways, and as a prospective teacher, I would like to use this in my future profession.’ TEXT ROBERT KARLSSON PHOTO MALIN ARNESSON

Malin Rosvall, who is to become a teacher, thinks that the ALC room provided an opportunity to learn in new ways. SCIENCE FACULTY MAGAZINE DECEMBER 2016

BREATHING NEW LIFE INTO HISTORY Imagine going into the remnants of a church dating back to the 12th century, taking out your phone, pointing it at the church’s roof — and being able to see how it looked when the church had just been built. In Gunnar Almevik’s research project, what once was reality can become reality again.

ith his colleague, Jonathan Westin, he is documenting material from churches digitally with the help of photos and then building up 3D models of the churches. They can then place objects in the models and display their interpretations of how they think the churches might have looked and evolved over the years.

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‘This model of the Hemse stave church on Gotland is built up using the 67 parts of the church that still remain’, he explains, displaying a finished model on his computer. ‘Churches arrived in Sweden with Christianity, and in the beginning, they were built with posts embedded in the ground and palisades as walls. As the centuries passed, however, the methods used to build churches were affected by several factors.

Södra Råda church was completely destroyed by arson in 2001. The building’s framework has been rebuilt, but digital layers are used to make the medieval wall and ceiling paintings visible. The series of images shows how 3D layers can be created using various archival materials. Here reconstructed paintings by Hans Peter Hedlund and photographs by Gabriel Hildebrandt and Marianne Bratt Gustafsson have been processed into digital layers in a 3D model. Model by Gunnar Almevik and Jonathan Westin.

On the computer screen the church rises up. It has no windows, but on the other hand it has a three-metre-high door — which is only 80 cm wide. Almevik uses the model to show how light might have entered the building, forming a very distinct pillar of light in the church interior. ‘The goal is to be able to place authentic materials in the model. Then we can show things like lighting effects in relation to the architecture. Testing different things in the model becomes part of the research process. THE SIX DIFFERENT churches in the project were built over a period extending from the 12th to the 17th centuries. Over the centuries several big changes in how churches were being designed and developed occurred. The first big change occurred when Christianity became the state religion during the latter part of the 12th century and the stave churches were no longer built. ‘They began building churches of stone; the power of the church was “petrified”. But in certain areas the wood building culture lived on. In those places churches were built with timber instead, using tighter construction than the old palisade, or stave, churches. In the 14th century the Church was rich and strong, and church interiors gained larger windows and more paintings with biblical motifs. But when the Black Death struck in the 1360s, construction came to a halt and almost no churches were built during those years.’ It was not until the 15th century that building got under way again. Architecture became more advanced, and old churches received cross vaults and stellar vaults. Then the guild system also came into play, which

led to more professional church construction. However, there was a decline in the number of churches being built, and it was only in the 17th century that construction picked up again. ‘Then we are into the Reformation. The churches have opened up between the chancel, where the altar is, and the nave, where the congregation is found. There are pulpits, pews and big windows that let in light’, says Almevik. IN THE PAST, reconstructions of these types of settings have often been subjected to criticism. The reconstructions have been made in public contexts where the end-user of the research is a museum visitor or a public interested in history. As Almevik describes it, there has been a gap between the research information and the public. ‘The criticism has been along the lines of “how can you know that it looked like that?”’ Technology now makes it possible to pose questions to the image and to give form to and communicate different images. I can

Södra Råda church. The image is a montage showing how the medieval wall and ceiling paintings can be made visible as digital layers on site in the reconstructed church. Illustration by Gunnar Almevik and Jonathan Westin.

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display my interpretation, but there can be several possible options. And the research reaches out to the audience. There are objects we have scanned that are located in secure rooms in Tumba, and, in this way, we make the source material available.’ IN THE PROCESS of documenting the chur-

ches, Almevik and his colleagues employ several scientific techniques. Using infra-red light, they can see things such as underpaintings, inscriptions that are not visible in normal light and windows that have been covered and sealed up. ‘In this way, we can approach a genuinely interdisciplinary research in which we put together different elements, both within our own faculty and drawing on the natural sciences and the human sciences. Currently, our efforts are focused on building up a lab and making contacts. It is largely a matter of mastering the software and collecting information about wooden churches in the North to identify periods of construction, where churches were built and what techniques were used. ‘It’s basic research that allows us to make credible interpretations and predicate things in our modelling of the churches’, says Almevik. TEXT ROBERT KARLSSON

Top picture: A first version of an interactive model of Södra Råda is produced using a game engine. Model by Gunnar Almevik and Johan Lund. Middle picture: Several stave churches that have been preserved because they were reused during the Middle Ages as floors in new church buildings are now stored in the Swedish History Museum’s warehouse. Hemse stave church in Gotland, which dates to 1107-1112, is one of the churches studied in-depth in the project. The picture shows a sketch for the reconstruction. Model by Gunnar Almevik. Bottom picture: Reconstruction of Hemse stave church from 1913, by stave church researcher Emil Ekhoff and the Swedish History Museum’s artist, Olof Sörling.

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VISUALISED MEDIEVAL WOODEN BUILDING CULTURE Research project that runs from 2015 to 2020. Six churches in Sweden from the 12th to the 17th centuries are being documented and built up virtually. The models can be used in applications so that a visitor can go into a church, point a phone at a wall and on the phone, see how paintings and objects may have looked and been positioned in the church. Collaboration is under way with the Computer Game Development programme at the University of Skövde and at places such as the Swedish History Museum in Stockholm.

FORSKNING 10 Decenber marks the biggest scientific event of the year. On the following pages two of our researchers present the Nobel prizes in physics and chemistry for interested readers.

Editor: Ulf Persson

THEME: THE NOBEL PRIZE 2016 PHYSICS & CHEMISTRY

Professor in Mathematics, Department of Mathematical Sciences

The Nobel Prize in Physics

’for theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions and the topological phases of matter’ of electronics and computers. The three laureates were rewarded for pivotal contriThe Kosterlitz-Thouless butions to our understanding of the topological transition properties of parPart of the prize ticular physical was awarded for a descripsystems such tion of the as twophase transidimensional tion between superfluids superfluids and oneor supercondimensional ductors and spin chains. the normal state Their research in a two-dimenis fundamental to a © ® Nobelstiftelsen sional layer of atoms (such as liquid helium) large and active field or electrons. This was work of research in condensed carried out in the early 70s matter physics with conwhen Kosterlitz was engaged nections to particle physics. in postdoctoral research with Although the research that Thouless at the University of was recognised is basic and Birmingham. rather abstract, it could eventually lead to new types SCIENCE FACULTY MAGAZINE DECEMBER 2016

THE NOBEL PRIZE 2016 There was seemingly a paradox in the theory of superfluids because in the simplest and generally accepted theory of phase transitions (Ginzburg-Landau), there was no critical temperature, Tc, over which a two-dimensional superfluid becomes normal — that is, when the superfluid properties, such as the absence of viscosity, disappear. This runs counter to the knowledge that the superfluid should be less robust in two dimensions than in three dimensions and that there is a critical temperature in 3D. THE SOLUTION TO THE paradox was that one had previously failed to take topological excitations into account. In a 2D superfluid the topological excitations rotate on the surface. The superfluid is described as a continuous complex wave function with amplitude and phase. If you make one rotation around the vortex, the phase must change with an integer multiple of 2π. (The phase is illustrated by the direction of a vector in Figure 1.) VORTICES CAN BE generated thermally, but because that requires a lot of energy, they come in pairs that stay together and rotate in the opposite direction. Kosterlitz and Thouless showed that at a certain temperature (now called the KT temperature, TKT) entropy tops the energy required to pull

apart the pairs and superfluidity is destroyed. Consequently, one also has a phase transition in two dimensions, but a special kind of topological phase transition. The KosterlitzThouless transition is now a fundamental concept in theoretical physics that has been confirmed experimentally in superfluids and superconductors and also describes how twodimensional solids melt.

Haldane’s hypothesis

Magnetism (such as in iron) is a complex phenomenon that has to do with the interplay between magnetic ions or electrons. Antiferromagnetism in particular, when nearby ions’ magnetic moments (spins) align in a counter direction, is an intrinsic quantum mechanic and many-body phenomenon. Just as in the case of superfluids, it is especially intricate in low (one or two) dimensions. The theoretical treatment of a one-dimensional chain of spins is a classic problem that largely was solved by Hans Bethe (who incidentally was Thouless’ PhD supervisor) back in 1931, using what is now called Bethe’s approach. A BIT LIKE A metal, the chain has excitations

with arbitrarily low energy. If you instead place two chains next to each other to form a ladder, it turns out that the system possesses an energy gap between the ground state and the lowest excited state. In the early 1980s

Figure 1.

Vortex (a), calculation of the winding number around a closed curve which contains the vortex (b), a vortex/anti-vortex pair that at a distance cancels each other out.

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THE NOBEL PRIZE 2016

Figure 2.

Spin chain (a), two-legged spin ladder (b), the unit vector of a sphere that corresponds to winding number 1.

Haldane was able to show that the difference between these two types of systems can be explained with the help of topology. In a semi-classical description of a spin as a unit vector, there is a topological term corresponding to the winding number of the vector over a sphere (space-time). Exactly as in the case of a vortex in a superfluid, this is an integer. For ladders with an even number of legs, the term yields nothing, and without the topological term, the semi-classical description has an energy gap, which now is called the Haldane gap. FOR LADDERS WITH an odd number of legs,

the topological term yields a varying symbol in the summation of different spin configurations, consistent with a state without an energy gap. This led Haldane to present the hypothesis that chains with an odd number of legs do not have a gap, while ladders with an even number of legs have a gap. This subsequently has been confirmed both theoretically and experimentally. The ground-breaking aspect of this was that the difference between the two systems could be understood via a topological argument.

Topological insulators, majorana states, spintronics and quantum computers

semiconductors, now called topological insulators, can be classified by a topological number. This is where topology finds concrete expression in that the material has what is known as a chiral state on the surface of the crystal, where the electronâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s spin is strongly linked to its orientation. It is hoped that this quality can be used in a new type of electronics, known as spintronics, in which the electronâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s spin instead of its charge conveys information. THE MAJORANA STATE, in which an electron

effectively divides itself into two parts, is a related area that currently is attracting a lot of attention, both theoretically and experimentally. There are hopes that these exotic states can be applied to quantum computers, where the robust nature of quantum bits are guaranteed by the fact that they are topological.

Mats Granath, Docent, Department of Physics, University of Gothenburg

Recently, similar models experienced a real renaissance from the realisation that certain SCIENCE FACULTY MAGAZINE DECEMBER 2016

THE NOBEL PRIZE 2016

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry This year’s Nobel laureates in chemistry have developed molecules whose movements can be controlled and that can perform a task when power is supplied. Simply put, it can be said that the world’s smallest machine came about when France’s Jean-Pierre Sauvage figured out how two molecular rings could be linked to each other and form a chain without involving chemical bonds. Scotland’s Sir J. Fraser Stoddart later discovered how to move the rings and the Netherlands’ Bernard L. Feringa found a way to set the rings in motion in a specific direction. We asked chemist Mate Erdelyi to describe this year’s Nobel Prize for those who are particularly interested in chemistry.

he Nobel Prize in chemistry this year recognizes the development of molecular tools that are capable of converting energy, in form of light or heat, into a controlled one-directional movement. As this concept shows some similarities to the machines of our everyday life, such as cars or elevators that convert the energy stored in electricity or petrol into controlled physical movement, it is often marketed as ‘the development of molecular machines’. These could possibly find applications in energy storage, medicinal chemistry and computing or as new types of functional nanomaterials.

ments by efficiently creating interlocked rings providing catenanes, a type of mechanically linked molecules (Figure 1), whose possible existence was first proposed by the Nobel Laurate of 1915, Richard Willstätter of ETH Zürich. The breakthrough of Sauvage was to recognize that the orthogonal arrangement of bidentate ligands in tetrahedral Cu(I) complexes (Figure 2) are applicable for generation of crossing points that are necessary for formation of catenanes. This approach, so called template synthesis, has been the basis for forming interlocked compounds ever since. L

IN THE EARLY 1980’S Jean-Pierre Sauvage,

today professor emeritus at the University of Strasbourg, made the first fundamental discoveries providing the basis for further develop-

Figure 2. In its tetrahedral complexes, Cu(I) forms bonds to four ligands (L) with a dihedral angle of ca 109.5°.

Cu L L

Figure 1. Catenanes are mechanically-interlocked molecular complexes, whose components cannot be separated without breaking a covalent bond.

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FRASER STODDART, TODAY employed at the Northwestern University in the USA, created rotaxane, a ring shaped molecule threaded onto an ’axle’ allowing the light, acidity or pH-controlled movement of the first back and forth between the endpoints of

THE NOBEL PRIZE 2016 motion, for example is applicable to rotate a glass rod put on the top of a series of them.

Figure 3. Rotaxanes are molecular complexes in which a ring shaped molecule is threaded onto another molecule forming an axle. The movement of the first molecule between the endpoints of the second can be controlled by light, for example.

the second linear molecule (Figure 3). This molecular complex can be seen as a controlled shuttle system, the prototype of artificial linear molecular motors or switches stimulating a vigorous activity along the same lines towards the construction of memory and logic units in electronic devices. Using millions of rotaxanes a memory device was created, in which molecular switches can be turned between an ‘on’ and an ‘off’ state. Later, the Stoddart group has also created molecular ‘muscles’ that, i.e. rotaxanes, can bend a thin sheet, and developed a molecular ‘lift’ that can raise itself by nearly a nanometer.

HIS MOST FAMOUS molecular system is often referred to as a ‘nanocar’, which is capable of converting the energy of light into a controlled motion of the entire molecule on a surface, due to the unidirectional motion of four double bonds similar to the motion of the four wheels of a car. The main impact of the work of Sauvage, Stoddart and Feringa is that they have initiated the development of smart, functional materials that can change their properties based on external signals. There are countless possible applications, which have already been initiated. To mention an example, Morten Grötli at the Department of Chemistry and Molecular Biology has, in collaboration with Joakim Andréasson at Chalmers, recently developed photoswichable RET kinase inhibitors, making use of azo-functionalized pyrazolopyrimidines, which enable the light control of a transmembrane receptor tyrosine kinase activity (Sci. Rep. 2015, 5, 9769). FOLLOWING SIMILAR LINES, I have worked

BEN FERINGA, ACTIVE AT the University of

Groningen in the Netherlands, has further developed the above concept by creating a molecular system that is capable of a light induced unidirectional stepwise motion by photoisomerisation of a carbon-carbon double bond (Figure 4) in an interlocked system. He has demonstrated that this ‘molecular motor’ could be used to provide macroscale

CH3

CH3 C C

H light

cis-2-butene

CH3 C C

CH3

at Uppsala University, under the supervision of Professor Gogoll, on the establishment of a photoswitchable beta-hairpin mimetic (Chem. Eur. J. 2005, 12, 403), whose stilbene-type molecular switch was subsequently utilized in the photocontrol of the activity of an artificial hydrolase enzyme (Chem. Eur. J. 2009, 15, 501). Besides controlling bioactivity, the same concept may be applied in countless other fields, for example for controlling the enantioselectivity of chiral catalysts.

trans-2-butene

Figure 4. Photoisomerisation of a carbon-carbon double bond is a slight, but highly impactful modification of the molecular structure of alkenes. The direction of the rotation can usually not be controlled, in contrast to the unidirectional motion seen in the compounds that were developed by Ben Feringa.

Mate Erdelyi, Docent, Department of Chemistry and Molecular Biology, University of Gothenburg

SCIENCE FACULTY MAGAZINE DECEMBER 2016

TRACES FROM CHERNOBYL STILL FOUND IN SEALS New research suggests that marine mammals have stored radioactive caesium in their bodies after the Chernobyl accident to a greater extent than their prey. This has been demonstrated by a 30-year time series analysis recreated with the help of museum collections.

n the night of Saturday, 26 April 1986, a reactor accident occurred at the nuclear power plant in Chernobyl in the former Soviet Union. A radioactive cloud spread over large parts of Europe,

reaching the Baltic Sea, among other places. Substances spread by the cloud included the radioactive isotope caesium-137. ‘Caesium is troublesome because it can accumulate in the body. It is chemically similar to potassium and is absorbed in the same way’, says Sadaf Saremi. She has just completed her master’s thesis in which she and her supervisor, senior lecturer Karin Hårding at the Department of Biological and Environmental Sciences, have analysed muscle samples from 23 seals from the environmental databank of the

A radioactive cloud spread over large parts of Europe after the 1986 Chernobyl accident. The amount of radioactivity in the Baltic Sea’s food web is still higher today than it was before the accident. 34

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Swedish Museum of Natural History. The samples were collected from 1985 onwards. They are part of the museum’s systematic programme to preserve tissue samples from seals captured as by-catch or shot to protect fishing gear. ‘We know that these kinds of fallout accumulate in fish, but we don’t know much about how they accumulate in mammals’, says Saremi. Seals are excellent subjects for studying environmental toxins, partly because they are at the top of the food chain and partly because they can live relatively long.’ WHEN THE RADIOACTIVE fallout from Chernobyl reached the Baltic Sea, it was absorbed by nature and stored in herring and other marine life. Herring is important prey for seals, and the caesium accumulated incrementally in the seals’ muscles. The highest levels of caesium were measured in the water and in herring relatively soon after the emission, while the caesium levels in seals peaked around 1990. After that there was a slow downward trend, with the amount of caesium in seals diminishing slightly year after year. ‘Caesium-137 has a half-life of 30 years, so it’s estimated that half of the radioactive caesium will be gone by 2020. In addition, caesium-137 is being transported out of food chains because of sedimentation. But the amount of radioactivity in organisms in the Baltic Sea ecosystem — that is, the food web — is still higher than it was before the Chernobyl accident.’ SAREMI EXPLAINS that there are two main

ways in which humans have spread radioactivity in the environment in and around the Baltic Sea: fallout from atmospheric nuclear weapons tests and the Chernobyl accident. Of the two, Chernobyl accounts for an estimated 83 per cent of the radioactive caesium found in the Baltic Sea today.

Analyses of the seals’ muscle samples were done by Mats Isaksson, Professor of Radiation Physics at Sahlgrenska Academy, using a germanium detector. At present, the number of studies of this kind that have been done on marine mammals is extremely limited, and Sadaf Saremi has analysed muscle samples from 23 seals from the Mats Isaksson sees several opportunities Swedish Museum of Natural History’s environmental databank. for using the results in the future. He is among those involved in a Nordic project in which he and his colleagues have been working for several years with models to describe the movement of radioactive materials in the ocean. ‘For example, what happens if there is an accident involving a submarine armed with nuclear weapons? What would that mean for marine mammals? I would like to link with this model in that case and compare it with our experimental data.’ SCIENTISTS KNOW relatively little about the

long-term effects the fallout is having on the seals. Saremi says that there are no physical signs that seals have been damaged by the levels measured. ‘But it’s important that we do this kind of research to see how radioactivity is accumulated in the food web — that is, how high the levels are in marine mammals in relation to the organisms they feed on. This knowledge will contribute a piece to the puzzle to help us understand what consequences a future accident might have.’ TEXT ROBERT KARLSSON PHOTO GETTY IMAGES

SCIENCE FACULTY MAGAZINE DECEMBER 2016

ALUMNUS PROFILE

Doctoral student life will have to wait The plan to study for a doctor’s degree will be dealt with in the future. Mathematician Per Sjögren chose instead to begin working in business. There he has an opportunity to work with optimisation, exactly what he is trained to do.

jögren actually considered of going ahead and studying for his doctorate after getting his master’s degree in mathematics. But during a job fair at his department, he came in touch with a representative of the Jeppesen multinational company. He was familiar with the company before, knowing it is one of Sweden’s largest employers when it comes to optimisation. The contact led to a proposal to do the work on his degree project there, and when it was finished an offer of employment would be waiting. Sjögren postponed his doctoral studies with the idea that it could be good to have some work experience before he went ahead. ‘It’s often easier to study if you have worked before, and that also applies to

Almost everyone in his department has a background in mathematics. Sjögren is working on developing optimisation software for the aviation industry, primarily software that helps companies schedule pilots and cabin crews. The company has most of the major airlines as its clients, and a great deal of modelling software is needed to meet the requirements of each individual customer. ‘All customers have different problems. They have different numbers of aircraft, different numbers of personnel with different qualifications, different trade agreements and different national laws.’ SINCE CHILDHOOD, IT has been obvious to Per Sjögren that he should devote himself to mathematics.

»Abstract thinking has always suited me» doctoral students. Especially if you have worked in related industries. I thought it was a good company, and I got to work on what I actually am trained to do.’

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‘It was the thing that was the most fun and that I was best at. Abstract thinking has always suited me.’ But he’s also a musician and has played the

PORTRÄTT

French horn since he was 10 years old, an instrument that he latched onto during a tryit day in the municipal music school. ‘I’ve heard many people say that it is not unusual to combine mathematics or science with music.’ He might have nurtured a dream of becoming a professional musician, but it didn’t materialise. Practising wasn’t fun enough, he says in retrospect. So he plays music in his free time, currently in the Gothenburg Wind Sinfoniette.

He’s satisfied with what he is working on. He gets to combine his interests in programming and mathematics. It is also rewarding to meet with customers to some degree. ‘It’s a good symbiosis. It has turned out very well.’

SJÖGREN HAS NOW worked at Jeppesen for

Education: master’s degree in theoretical mathematics and master’s degree in applied mathematics with a focus on optimisation. Music: plays French horn in various orchestras. Hobbies: Makes chocolate pralines, for his own consumption and to give as gifts. Now before Christmas he flavours them with saffron and brandy. A combination of passion fruit, mandarin liqueur and white chocolate isn’t bad either. Reads: most fantasy and science fiction.

seven years, and he has no immediate plans to go back to university, even if the clear majority of his classmates have already obtained their doctorates. ‘It is a long educational process, and it’s hard to see what I would get from it. I have gained a great deal of expertise in what I am doing here. As a doctoral student, you get more breadth — but also expertise in what you are researching, of course.’

TEXT HELENA ÖSTLUND PHOTO SOFIA SABEL

PER SJÖGREN

SCIENCE FACULTY MAGAZINE DECEMBER 2016

FORSKNING

Tibet’s glaciers affect billions

An area the size of Greenland, with glaciers that serve as water reservoirs for 1.5 billion people. It’s not surprising that the Tibetan Plateau is a very interesting area of research, and at the University of Gothenburg several scientists are studying Tibet.

he Tibetan Plateau is the highest and most extensive highlands in the world. The great Asian rivers all have their origins on the plateau or in the neighbouring mountains, and what happens on the plateau affects water resources for almost a third of the world’s population. Professor Deliang Chen leads the Regional Climate Group at the University of Gothenburg studying climate change in Tibet, among other things. With Chinese scientists from the Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the group has studied the impact of climate change on the water balance in the region. In a joint study published late last year, researchers demonstrated that the flow of water in rivers during the coming decades will either remain stable or increase compared with the

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1971-2000 period. The result runs counter to apprehensions expressed in the 2007 climate report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and elsewhere that the glaciers would disappear by 2035 and water supplies in major Asian rivers would decline. ‘This is good news’, says Professor Chen, ‘because social and economic development in the surrounding areas, including China, India, Nepal and other countries in South East Asia, is highly dependent on climate and water supplies. But the fact that glaciers in the region are shrinking can become a concern in the long term, and we must keep a close watch over what’s happening with global warming.’ HE HAS BEEN very active in the Third Pole

Environment (TPE) international research programme that coordinates research on Tibet in 15 countries. Recently, Chen and some of the world’s foremost scientists led efforts that culminated in a 10-year research plan for the region. “There is still considerable uncertainty about the future of the glaciers, since our un-

derstanding of meteorological and hydrological processes that are important for regional climate and the water balance of rivers is very limited. So long-range international cooperation is needed to tackle the challenge.’ ANOTHER RESEARCHER WHO has chosen Ti-

bet as his area of research is geomorphologist Jakob Heyman, whose interest in Tibet was aroused when he was still a doctoral student in Stockholm. Unlike his colleagues who are studying Tibet to predict tomorrow’s climate, Heyman is primarily interested in how the Tibetan Plateau looked in the past. ‘The results show that the glaciers were not much larger than today during the last 15,000 to 100,000 years, which is a big difference compared to here in Northern Europe, which was covered by ice during the last ice age’, he says. One of the reasons for this could be the dry climate. Although the area has been colder, it has not received more snow. Another explanation is the so-called sublimation that occurs at the extreme conditions that exist, which means that the ice does not melt and become water but instead turns directly into water vapour.

In his research, Heyman uses a special dating method called cosmogenic dating. When a rock surface is exposed to cosmic rays, cosmogenic nuclides (isotopes) form in the uppermost layer of rock and a few metres down. By measuring the incredibly small quantities of these nuclides in quartz, it is possible to calculate how long the rock formation has been subjected to cosmic radiation, or if it has been buried under ice instead. ‘Much of the work involves compiling large amounts of data’, says Heyman, who has visited the Tibetan Plateau on seven occasions. DURING THE EARLY 1990s, researchers took a

long ice core from a plateau glacier in northwestern Tibet that goes back in time 130,000 years. And recently research teams from the United States and China have obtained two new ice cores from the same glacier to collect more data. ‘With good data, we hope we can find out what happened further back in time, and I am hoping to work more with the northern part in the future.’ TEXT CAMILLA PERSSON PHOTO JAKOB HEYMAN

SCIENCE FACULTY MAGAZINE DECEMBER 2016

ABABACAR DIAGNE Name: Ababacar Diagne Age: 34 Education: Student in the master’s programme in financial mathematics. Has a PhD in numerical analysis. Born in: Saint Louis, Senegal Lives in: Hisingen. Hobbies: Literature. Running, with favourite distance of 10 km.

Found the right education in Gothenburg He wanted to do something more practical with his theoretical knowledge of mathematics. ‘At the University of Gothenburg I found a master’s course with a perfect blend of mathematics and finance. It was exactly what I was looking for’, says Ababacar Diagne.

e is an open person, easy to talk to, and it is obvious that he navigates both the complicated and mundane with ease. Ababacar, or ‘Baba’, as his friends call him, acknowledges with an embarrassed smile that it has always been easy for him to learn, both in school and outside it. ‘During my time in high school, I read a lot, both French and African fiction.

SCIENCE FACULTY MAGAZINE DECEMBER 2016

Actually, I was more interested in literature than mathematics at first, but then I switched.’ TWO YEARS AGO, ABABACAR completed his doctorate in numerical analysis. During his doctoral studies, he divided his time between Senegal Gaston Berger University and the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm because he had received a scholarship and been accepted into an internationally oriented doctorate programme. ‘It was a so-called ‘sandwich programme’ and I had a supervisor in Senegal and one in Stockholm. At first, I spoke mostly English in Sweden, but two years ago I felt that I wanted to learn the Swedish language,’ says Ababacar, who also speaks

fluent French and English in addition to Swedish and Wolof, his native language. Three months ago he came to Gothenburg. ‘I wanted to drop theoretical math for something more applicable. Financial mathematics has always interested me, and when I started looking around me, I found a master’s course in financial mathematics at the University of Gothenburg, a collaboration between the Department of Mathematical Sciences and the School of Economics. That combination suits me perfectly, I thought.’ Friends shook their heads, wondering why he would go back to university again after getting his doctorate? ‘My choice lived up to my expectations. Now I am studying mathematics especially oriented to finance, the teachers are very good and the research is interesting. It’s the right combination for me because I want to be able to return home to Senegal and use my knowledge there. I would very much like to teach at university and also work as a consultant in industry.’ ABABACAR ENJOYS SWEDEN but wants to

go home after his studies. Each month he sends money home to his parents and siblings in Senegal. It’s possible he might remain in Sweden and work for a few years to, as he puts it, ‘pay back the hospitality and the privilege to be able to study here’. ‘The most valuable thing I am getting here in Sweden is the knowledge that I can bring home with me. Senegal is a developing country, of course, and I want to share what I’ve learnt with my countrymen in my generation and the next one. Once, a friend asked me what the meaning of life is. For me, the meaning of life is that everyone helps each other and that I can contribute.’ TEXT & PHOTO CARINA ELIASSON

Professional education for physics teachers This autumn a new professional development course for physics teachers began. ‘We have received a very positive response to the course and the format from participants’, course coordinator Jonas Enger says. Nearly 20 upper-level compulsory teachers and upper-second school teachers have signed up for the autumn course. The course is based on current research results in physics, educational and didactic aspects of learning and new learning environments. Among other things, the Department of Physics is using the recently inaugurated Active Learning Classroom (ALC). ‘A group of teachers has focused on the importance of increasing active learning and the social context for learning among students’, says Enger. ‘The teachers themselves may work with the room and plan a course exercise. Then they can take their students there and test the exercise.’ ENGER HOPES THAT the course will help participants to advance in their professional training and what they learn will lead to changes in the classroom. He believes that the University of Gothenburg can play a major role by enabling trained teachers to continue their education and also take part in networking among active teachers. ‘It’s important for teachers to have factual, educational and didactic professional training as a motivating force in their professional lives and that we do not cut connections with our students when they finish their studies.’ TEXT ROBERT KARLSSON

SCIENCE FACULTY MAGAZINE DECEMBER 2016

AWARDS

Received a doctorate at the same time as Evert Taube He became a doctor of chemistry when Evert Taube was awarded an honorary doctorate. Bo Lamm is the jubilee doctor who 50 years ago was the first person to defend his doctor’s thesis in chemistry at the University of Gothenburg.

e was 31 years old when he received his doctorate in 1966, the same year Evert Taube was an honorary doctorate. ‘I remember that Evert Taube appreciated the distinction very much’, Bo Lamm says. ‘The conferrer of doctorates then was a Latin professor, and he gave a long speech in Latin to Taube, who I actually believe understood it because he spoke Provençal.’

LAMM BEGAN HIS studies in Lund in 1953, and after receiving a bachelor’s degree, he moved to the Nobel Institute of Chemistry in Stockholm. ‘When my supervisor, Lars Melander, became professor of organic chemistry at the University of Gothenburg, I moved with him to Gothenburg, where my doctoral work was carried out.’

SCIENCE FACULTY MAGAZINE DECEMBER 2016

After his doctoral degree, he starting working at Hässle, which is now Astra Zeneca, and from 1967 to 1969 Lamm served as head of the chemical laboratory there. But he preferred research and got a position as a senior lecturer in 1970 at the joint Chemistry Department of Chalmers and the University of Gothenburg. ‘I have also helped lay the foundation for the Chemistry Department at the University of Gothenburg. After serving as the University’s senior lecturer at Chalmers and as a part-time professor at the University of Gothenburg, I returned in the 1980s to Hässle as senior scientist. I did not leave Astra Zeneca until I was 70.’ BO LAMM HAS mainly been engaged in three areas. His doctoral work dealt with kinetic reaction rates.

‘Later I worked with organic electrochemistry for a long time. I suppose that was the most fun of all. Electrochemistry can be used in many areas. For example, it has been used in nylon production. It’s extremely good from an environmental point of view because electrochemistry is free of by-products and unnecessary emissions can be limited.’ The third area Lamm engaged in is preparative liquid chromatography. ‘This is a separation method that allows you to distinguish different substances when they move at different speeds — in a column of silica gel, for example — and are divided up in different colours. But, of course, I have also taught both undergraduate courses and doctoral courses and supervised doctoral students.’ TEXT & PHOTO CARINA ELIASSON

AWARDS

2016

Faculty of Science doctoral thesis prize awarded to a physicist

DELIANG CHEN, professor at the Department of Earth Sciences, has been appointed chairman of the Stockholm Water Prize Nominating Committee by the Board of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

The Faculty of Science prize for best doctoral thesis in 2016 goes to Jonas Einarsson at the Department of Physics. His research deals with how small particles are transported in our surroundings. The world is full of small particles Photo Rasmus Einarsson such as bacteria, viruses, plankton or soot particles. ‘It is important to understand how particulates affect their surroundings and how the surroundings transport particles’, Einarsson says. ‘This is a key to understanding the life of microorganisms, protecting ourselves from air pollution and developing new materials in industry.’ But the fundamental equations that describe how the particles move in gases and liquids are so unwieldy that often even a supercomputer is unable to sufficiently resolve the details. ‘Our job in theoretical fluid mechanics is to invent new, simpler equations that can describe the dynamics of small particles. These simplified equations often become building blocks of larger computer models that help us understand the particles in our environment.’ Einarsson is now continuing his research at Stanford University as part of a research group that is a world leader in applying the fundamental equations of largescale computer simulations.

FREDRIK PLEIJEL, researcher

in the Department of Marine Sciences, has won a prize in the 2016 Royal Society Publishing photography competition. KRISTINA SUNDBÄCK, professor emerita in the Department of Marine Sciences, has been awarded the Rosen’s Linnaeus Prize in Botany by the Royal Physiographic Society of Lund.

Recognised for meritorious contributions in education Seven people were recognised in 2016 by the Faculty of Science for meritorious contributions in education: Barbara Casari, Chemistry and Molecular Biology Lasse Larsson, Conservation Stefan Lemurell, Mathematical Sciences Marie Lenngren, Biological and Environmental Sciences Sten-Åke Wängberg, Marine Sciences Sten Salomonson, Physics Sofia Thorsson, Earth Sciences

Research award winner Mathematician Orsola Tommasi receives the Faculty of Science 2016 research award. Her research focuses on algebraic geometry. ‘It feels good!’, a delighted Orsola Tommasi says. ‘I’m new here at the University of Gothenburg, just having started in April 2016, and getting the award makes me feel extra welcome.’

SCIENCE FACULTY MAGAZINE DECEMBER 2016

RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS

Climate change affects mussel (and human) health There is growing evidence that climate change may increase the occurrence of toxic algae and harmful bacteria, which then accumulate in mussels and affect their health. This is shown in a research study recently presented in Nature Scientific Reports. Mussels are an important source of protein in southern India and a fast-growing consumer product. A study of seawater in closed eco-

systems (mesocosms) tested how climate change affects the health of mussels when the level of toxic algae and harmful marine microorganisms increases in the sea. The study was conducted in southern India by researchers at the University of Gothenburg along with Indian researchers. ‘Increased temperatures and rainfall will bring about a stratified water mass’, says Anna Godhe, professor at

Mesocosms, closed ecosystems

the Department of Marine Sciences. ‘That promotes the growth of toxic algae and bacteria at the expense of other helpful microplanktons — the food for mussels. As a result, we get an indirect effect of climate change on the health of mussels.’  Link to the article: http://www.nature.com/articles/ srep32413

New research contributes to more efficient solar cells of the future By merging two photons with low energy into one with higher energy, electrical output and the efficiency of solar cells can be increased, according to a new study in Nature Communications. Essentially all renewable energy on Earth originates with the Sun. One of the most effective ways of

making use of light from the sun is with solar cells, but efficiency today is only 15-20 per cent. ‘Only a small part of all the energy that the sun beams to earth can be converted into electricity. Photons with very high and very low energy remain untapped’, says the study’s lead author, Karl Börjesson, at the Department of Chemistry and Molecular Biology. One way to utilise the photons that have too little energy to contribute to

electricity is to ‘up-convert’ them. Photon up-converting means merging two photons with low energy into one photon with higher energy, which then can increase electrical output and the efficiency of solar cells. ‘What we showed in this study is how it’s possible to capture photons from all directions, up-convert them and then send them out in a predetermined direction.’  Link to the article: http://www.nature.com/articles/ ncomms12689