NEWS In late summer, Lotta Edholm took office as Minister for Upper-Secondary Education, Higher Education and Research, and her first visit to a university was to Umeå University. During her visit, the Minister met with Vice-Chancellor Tora Holmberg and other members of the University Management, as well as the student unions. The meeting covered everything from teacher training programmes to the Nobel Prize-winning research at MIMS - The Laboratory for Molecular Infection Medicine Sweden.
Minister for Upper-Secondary Education, Higher Education and Research, Lotta Edholm, and Vice-Chancellor Tora Holmberg. Photo: Mattias Pettersson
"This is my first visit as Minister for this area, and it is often the case that you learn much more by visiting the operations than by reading up on them or holding digital meetings. My first impression of Umeå University is that it really is a comprehensive university – it has everything! Being able to showcase this breadth is a huge competitive advantage when recruiting students. Not least for the students themselves, who can switch between courses and programmes if they find they have made the wrong choice or want to study something else," says Minister Lotta Edholm.
Lotta Edholm also received information about Umeå University's rich offering of teacher training programmes and had the opportunity to discuss with Cathrine Norberg, Deputy Vice-Chancellor for education on the first- and second-cycle level, how teacher training programmes can be strengthened in the future, which she appreciated and found instructive.
"We have talked a lot today about teacher training programmes and the challenges that exist with low application rates for certain programmes, and what we can do about it to get more young people interested in taking on Sweden's most important profession," said Lotta Edholm.
Also present was Oliver Billker, Professor at the Department of Molecular Biology and Director of MIMS, who spoke about the strong research at the centre and the research environment at Umeå University that enabled Emmanuelle Charpentier's groundbreaking discovery of the CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing tool, which was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020.
Vice-Chancellor Tora Holmberg and Minister Lotta Edholm also had a more private conversation where they discussed everything from the academic excellence and freedom of higher education to international recruitment and migration law to the importance of excellent basic research.
"It was a rewarding conversation and we felt a little extra honour that the new Minister for Higher Education and Research chose to visit Umeå University as her first higher education institution. In addition, Universum was full of our newly arrived international students, and all over campus, new students were playing music and holding various welcome celebrations in the sunshine, so the setting was truly perfect," says Vice-Chancellor Tora Holmberg.