Two strategic recruitment initiatives awarded to Umeå University
NEWS
The Swedish Research Council has awarded funding under its initiative for the strategic recruitment of assistant professors. Umeå University has received funding for two researchers.
Sweden aims to be a world-leading nation in research and innovation. To achieve this, the best researchers must be recruited – regardless of where in the world they come from. As part of this effort, the Swedish Government has tasked the Swedish Research Council with establishing a programme for strategic recruitment, with a particular focus on the national career-development position of assistant professor.
The aim is to strengthen higher education institutions’ ability to recruit outstanding early-career researchers and to create long-term conditions for research of the highest scientific quality. Scientific excellence, researcher mobility and international experience have been central in the assessment.
Through this initiative, the awarded researchers will receive funding at assistant professor level for five years, with the possibility of additional funding at associate professor level following evaluation. In total, the Swedish Research Council is allocating SEK 330 million for the period 2026–2031.
A total of 109 applications were submitted, of which 22 were granted funding, 2 of these awards went to Umeå University: two researchers who have each been granted SEK 15 million over five years.
The awarded researchers are:
Josefine Klingspor
Most recently assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh. Prior to this, she was a Mellon Fellow (Andrew W. Mellon Foundation) in the humanities at Stanford University.
Her research interests include early modern philosophy (in particular Spinoza), metaphysics and medieval philosophy. Research subject: Philosophy Project title: Spinoza’s Monism and Metaphysical Constitution Read more about Josefine Klingspor on her webpage.
Gabriel Wallin
Most recently assistant professor in statistics at the School of Mathematical Sciences at Lancaster University. He was previously a researcher at the Department of Statistics at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Before that, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the French national research institute Inria and received his PhD from the Department of Statistics at Umeå University.
His research focuses on developing flexible statistical machine learning methods to accurately identify latent (unobserved) structures in social, behavioural and health data. Research subject: Statistics in the social sciences Project title: Next-generation latent variable models for data-driven social science. Read more about Gabriel Wallin on his webpage.
