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Outreach should be meritorious
The University of Gothenburg is an enormous collective problem- solving organisation that contributes to development throughout our entire society. And yet, outreach brings little merit in academic circles. I am hoping to change that, explains Torbjörn Lundh. He is Professor of Biomathematics and the new Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Outreach and Utilization. OUTREACH, OR THIRD-stream
activities as it was formerly known, is often emphasized as something in which the university should invest more effort. But what is outreach, really? – I have just stepped down as the First Assistant Dean for Outreach at the Faculty of Science, and that was a matter that occupied me significantly initially. Uppsala University has a tripartite definition that I have taken to heart: outreach is about collaboration and utilization as well as information dissemination and exchange with wider society. These parts can then be specified further: information dissemination may be about popular science, participation in public discourse, school visits and so on. However, many people find the term “utilization” a sensitive term. Research is supposed to be free, and not serve someone else’s interests. – A Mathematician’s Apology is the title of an essay from 1940 in which the British mathematician Godfrey Harold Hardy points to the beauty of number theory, a branch of mathematics that he argued only exists for its own sake, without providing benefit or inflicting harm. But number
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theory was the foundation for cryptography which, as computers have become ever more common, has turned into a very heated topic. The example tells us that it is difficult to determine what may become useful in the future, which of course is an argument in favour of the free search for knowledge. Anyone who dislikes “utilization” is free to come up with a different term, what is important is what we do, not what we call it. TORBJÖRN LUNDH HAS contributed to utilization himself, such as by working with a vascular surgeon and a textile engineer to create a special bandage that is easy to apply using precisely the right pressure. – I had no idea there were problems applying pressure bandages, which is something that we have been doing for thousands of years, until I met with the vascular surgeon. So the collaboration led to new insights as well as to a new product. Torbjörn Lundh’s field, biomathematics, operates in the boundary between chemistry, physics, medicine and computer science, in addition to mathematics and biology. Meeting with several different researchers has
The example tells us that it is difficult to determine what may become useful in the future, which of course is an argument in favour of the free search for knowledge. TORBJÖRN LUNDH
made him think about how to facilitate mutual understanding. – A FEW YEARS AGO a colleague of mine from Chalmers, Philip Gerlee, and I published the book Scientific Models. In it, we try to unravel what different researchers mean when they say that they use a model. Is it about a simpler representation of reality, a way of explaining a mathematical relationship, or an actual plastic structure depicting molecules? Difficulties in working together may arise from the fact
