Hans Karlsson new Chair of the NeIC Board
At its Board meeting on the 14th June Steen Pedersen, Director of the Danish e-Infrastructure Collaboration (DeIC), who has served as Chair of the NeIC Board for a two-year period, handed over his responsibilities as Chair to Hans Karlsson, Director of the Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing (SNIC). Hans will serve as Chair of NeIC Board for two years, while Hans Eide, Special Advisor at UNINETT Sigma2 has been elected as chair-in-elect for the following two-year period. NeIC would like to thank Steen Pedersen for his service as NeIC Chair for the past two years.
NeIC sat down with Hans Karlsson to talk about NeIC and its role in the Nordic region.
Tell us about yourself
My background is in research, in computational chemical physics. I started working on e-science research education in a graduate research school in scientific computing in Sweden many years ago. After that, I moved on to the local computing center at Uppsala University. Since 2016, I’ve been the director of the Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing (SNIC).
What is your history with NeIC so far?
The history between me and NeIC goes back to when I was a part of a survey organized by Nordforsk about a Nordic graduate school in scientific computing. When I started as the director of SNIC in 2016, I also became a member of the NeIC board.
What, in your opinion, is the value of NeIC?
The NeIC board in itself is a very good forum for open discussion between the Nordic countries. We can take up issues there and see what we can do together and how we can benefit from the different competencies in different countries. I see NeIC as a great platform for communication and pooling competencies. It is the natural focus point for Nordic cooperation within e-sciences. And, since it’s financially supported by the research councils in the member countries, it also gives them the incentive to utilise NeIC for this kind of collaboration.
What do you think are the key challenges and opportunities in the Nordic e-infrastructure field?
EOSC-Nordic is a big opportunity for the Nordics. It will be very beneficial for the collaboration between the participating countries. The challenge, however, is to get it to work. It is new for NeIC and involves a many different actors and work packages that need to work together. Another challenge for the Nordic collaboration is that the countries have different national visions and routes for their e-infrastructure, something we need to consider when developing the NeIC strategy. I see that we can use EOSC-Nordic as a vehicle for collaboration, for finding new research areas to collaborate within. All in all, I feel that NeIC is of great importance for adding Nordic value to collaborations within e-science.