PoliTO in Stockholm for the Unite! Summer Community Event

The second part of the V Unite! Dialogue was held on-site in the form of a Summer Community Event at KTH Royal Institute of Technologyin Stockholm. Unite! Erasmus+ Task Forces and H2020 Work Packages worked together in more than 30 focused meetings. In addition, a number of open seminars were arranged on different Unite!-related themes.

“KTH is extremely happy to have been hosting the on-site Unite! Summer Community Event as a complement to the March 2022 KTH Dialogue. The importance of this event is also given by the fact that for the first time the whole community convened physically in the same venue, including the colleagues involved in the H2020 project who have so far only had the possibility to meet online”, said Mirko Varano, Key Liaison Officer for Unite! at KTH.

The event also represented the first occasion in which a few representatives from the two new future partner universities, Graz University of Technology and Wroclaw Technical University, joined the Alliance activities in person.

During the open welcome session, Stefan Östlund, Vice President for Global Relations at KTH gave a short speech on the theme of Responsible Internationalization and Roberto Zanino, Rector’s Delegate for PhD Programmes and International University Networks at Politecnico di Torino, presented the expected contents of the forthcoming last Dialogue, to be held in Torino at the end of the Summer, and focusing on the future of Unite! as well as on the integration of its education and R&I dimensions.  The Community Event also offered seminars on the themes of sustainable campus, intercultural competences, gender equality, diversity and equal conditions as well as a visit to the KTH Live-in Laboratory, where students live and sleep, monitored by sensors as a research project. There were also presentations of the winning students and student teams of H@ck your Covid hackathon and Unite!4Future competition.

“The Stockholm Event gave a clear perception of how active the entire E+ and H2020 Unite! Community has been and is, as well as of the excitement and expectations towards the announcement of the results of new E+ call, expected at the end of July. If Unite! will be successful, it will have ahead of itself the perspective of another 4 years of joint activities (with a possible extension until the end of 2028) which should lead to a deeper and larger scale integration of the partner universities”, said Professor Roberto Zanino, Key Liaison Officer for Unite! at PoliTo.

The next Dialogue will take place in Torino in 20-22 September 2022 and will be the final Unite! Dialogue of the first E+ pilot phase. The current Unite! H2020 pilot project, coordinated by PoliTo, will run until the end of 2023.