International research facilities improve specialist expertise and skills in Sweden

One challenge for a country with a small population like Sweden is to ensure a supply of specialist expertise and skills. Here, Big Science research facilities play a key role. Swedes who have worked at one of the big facilities, in teams that include world-leading researchers in various fields, bring new knowledge and experiences with them when they return home.

Benefits of increased Swedish presence

Elias Waagaard is a doctoral student in accelerator physics at CERN. He sees the benefits of increasing the Swedish presence in such research facilities.

“Expertise and skills that we Swedes acquire here at CERN and then take home are very important, both for developing our own research facilities and for spreading specialist expertise to Swedish industry,” he explains.

Advancing the frontiers 

Maja Olvegård, researcher at the FREIA Laboratory at Uppsala University, sees how significant it is when the large-scale research facilities advance technological development.

The research community and industry can build up a synergetic interaction in which the research facilities develop pioneering processes and methods, and industry uses the new knowledge and technology in developing state-of-the-art high-tech products.

“Extending the boundaries of what is possible, investigating and developing something that has never been done before, requires the very best researchers and the chance to work in long projects,” she says.