Produktion2030’s Graduate School in Canada: Openness to research collaborations

DAY 6 of our Produktion2030 course to Canada!

Today, we had a day in Ottawa – the capital of Canada! In the morning, we went to visit the Ericsson 5G Lab at Carleton University. The research group there welcomes us with coffee and Canadian sweets and we got a very interesting introduction to their group’s work on 5G research. Ericsson has been in Canada for over 70 years and is among the top 14 R&D spenders in Canada. The professors highlighted the openness towards collaborating in research projects with Sweden, which is now even easier because Horizon Europe opened up for Canada. We also presented our research topics and found some common interests with the PhD students at Carleton! Then we got a tour through the lab and got introduced to the experimental setups the research groups do, e.g. 5G can be used to localize objects in a 3D space.

After a long walk in the center of Ottawa and the park around the residence of the Governor General of Canada, we had a visit to the Swedish Embassy. Here, we met the Deputy Head of Mission and the Ambassador and had super interesting discussions about Swedish-Canadian politics and research possibilities. It became very clear that they think our research topics are key areas that the Canadian industry is looking for. They pointed out that they try to find key partnerships they can focus on and make a difference. Right now, these are within the mining industry, forestry, and AI. We also talked about the collaboration between Sweden and Canada when it comes to battery production (with the upcoming Northvolt factory) and defense industry. We are very happy about this visit! For those who already felt a bit homesick after a week here, we even got home-baked cinnamon buns at the Embassy.

Now, we are on the road towards Toronto, where we will spend our last two days of the course!