It´s all about building relationships for outgoing Science events coordinator Åsa Grunning

Almost since the very beginning of LINXS Åsa Grunning has been involved with the setup of LINXS and then managing the events and community building activities for the scientific community, both in Sweden and internationally. Now she is moving on to build new communities in other fields such as fashion, gaming, and the creative sector in EU.

When Åsa started to work for LINXS, the organisation consisted of a few people and the location was a room provided by the Collaboration Office at Lund University. One of her first tasks was to scout for a larger facility to start growing the community and the activities in various research areas and a mix of research disciplines.

Now the two floors at Ideon are filled with activity by the Management team, the working groups, visiting guest researchers, doctoral students affiliated to LINXS and of course participants in all kinds of events – work group meetings, seminars, larger conferences, town hall meetings and more.  

“ The most rewarding with this job is to build relationships, links to and between people. In the case of LINXS it has been groups of researchers and postdocs that I had not been in contact with previously” , says Åsa Grunning. I have learnt a lot over the past years even if the scientific contents at some events can be hard to grasp for a person who is not schooled in the natural sciences. 

In contrast to her former projects at Lund University that mainly focussed on building bridges and arenas for interaction between researchers and the general public, the work at LINXS has had the aim of facilitating networks and meeting platforms for various groups of researchers, from different faculties and countries.  Supporting the work groups in developing conference programs or workshop series, the position as Scientific events coordinator is very dynamic.

“ I enjoy my work a lot and it has been rewarding to solve so many different challenges. In the start it was a lot of logistics and technical equipment to setup and then developing routines and processes. Lately we have learnt a lot from the pandemic and now in a post-covid phase we are adapting to the new standard, which is to organise high quality hybrid events”, says Åsa Grunning.

Now it is time to move on to new challenges after the summer holidays. There are many EU projects in the pipeline that requires more resources at the Lund University Collaboration Office. The new topics will be quite different from the natural sciences that dominate the LINXS community. Instead, the subjects will range from fashion and gaming to a spectre of cultural and creative businesses.

“ I wish all the best to the people I have met and worked with during these years and have tried to support in all kinds of ways. LINXS is a fantastic platform for both young, middle-career and senior researchers and I hope that more will take the chance to use the available support and opportunities to organise activities and grow their networks. I am sure the coming years will be just as exciting and a new phase will surely start at the new location in Science Village”, concludes Åsa Grunning.