Towards Equal Opportunities In Academia – Experiences And Lessons Learned Internationally And At Uppsala University

In today’s society, many organisations have gender equality on their agenda. So also Uppsala University, the first university in Sweden, where we aim for diversity in all activities to achieve higher quality in our academic tasks and equity for the individual. To reach this, we specifically encourage applicants of any gender and with different birth background, functionality, and life experience in our recruitments. However, good recruitment statistics is not a result per se; in my opinion, to reach equal opportunities we need a change of mindset. For example, there ought to be transparency in the decisions leading to promotion of our staff members. In this talk, I will present some of my experiences and lessons learned during the years internationally and at our Faculty. I will give my views on how our academic leadership foster good work environments, where job satisfaction – and thereby higher scientific quality – is reached thanks to diversity in gender and other grounds of discrimination. In fact, we as leaders are role models who either become (or do not become) successful in recruiting, promoting, and thereby retaining women as well as men. Welcome to discuss this matter and share your experiences!

Speakers

Prof. Ingela Nyström of Uppsala University, Sweden

About Speaker: 

Professor Ingela Nyström’s research interest is interactive segmentation, visualization, digital geometry, and quantitative shape analysis of volume images with their medical applications. The career has developed from her background with a MSc degree in applied computer science and mathematics, and the PhD degree in computerised image analysis from Uppsala University, Sweden, in 1991, and in 1997, respectively.
She has held a number of leadership positions, for example, forming the Division of Visual Information and Interaction at the Dept. of Information Technology, UU, during 2012-2018. Since 2012, she is the Director of the Centre for Image Analysis. During 2006-2011, she was the Director of the Uppsala high-performance computer centre SNIC-UPPMAX and during 2011-2015 Coordinator of eSSENCE, a joint strategic effort in e-Science by Lund University, Umeå University, and Uppsala University.
In addition, she has served on a number of committees and organisations – at the University, nationally, and internationally. One example is that she was board member of the Faculty of Science of Technology, Uppsala University during 2011-2014. Early in her career in 2000, she was elected board member (President 2002-2006) of the Swedish Society for Automated Image Analysis (SSBA) and continued to serve in the board until 2012. During later ten years, she has served as member of the Executive Committee (2nd Vice-President 2008-2010, Secretary 2010-2014, President 2014-2016, Past President 2016-2018) of the International Association of Pattern Recognition (IAPR). She was Vice-Chair of the Swedish Council for Research Infrastructure (RFI), Vetenskapsrådet, during 2014-2019. Currently, she is the Chair of the Board of the Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing (SNIC) as well as member of the Board of Directors of the Norwegian UNINETT Sigma2.