Umeå University is investing just over SEK 50 million on three prioritised research areas. This is an investment to crank the research up another notch in the multidisciplinary breadth that characterises this university.
The prioritised research areas are:
Learning and brain plasticity throughout the life span
The capacity to learn and remember is fundamental for human behaviour. From birth onwards, we make habits, learn skills and form a vast knowledge bank. The brain’s capability to incorporate various experiences relies on its plasticity. There are striking differences between individuals when it comes to plasticity and the possibility to learn, and such differences are magnified due to age, brain injury and neurodegenerative diseases. An overall purpose and goal of the work in this prioritised research area is to identify and understand various factors that affect individual differences in learning and plasticity across the lifespan. This prioritised research area emanates from a long tradition of research at Umeå University, with access to relevant infrastructure such as databases, biobanks and brain-imaging methods. This research area brings together prolific researchers from different fields and is expected to markedly advance the research frontier and form basis for new research ideas. When fully developed, this prioritised research area will enable the study of lifelong learning and plasticity on mechanistic levels spanning from molecular and cellular, through structural and functional brain levels, all the way to applied levels such as perceived function, learning in schools, public health, and the community.
Mastering microbial infections
Infectious diseases are a major threat to global health with an enormous impact on individual lives and societies. Microbial infections are inherently complex in nature, with multiple factors influencing the initiation, progression and severity of disease. The main purpose of this prioritised research area is to address the complexity of infection by aligning clinical research with fundamental preclinical research involving, among other, experts in biology, chemistry and physics. The prioritised research area builds on a very strong research foundation of groundbreaking discoveries in infection medicine – complemented by newly-established computational capacities in data-driven life sciences. These strengths will be integrated to tackle critical knowledge gaps in infection medicine with a cross-disciplinary approach. The output will benefit research, education and health care.
Plant science for a sustainable green transformation of the subarctic
The demand for food, animal feed and other plant-based products is expected to double by 2050, making plant science directly relevant for the majority of the UN’s 2023 Agenda goals for sustainable development. Umeå University, together with the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Umeå, has one of the strongest environments for plant research in Europe. The main purpose of this prioritised research area is to strengthen existing research, expand it towards new applications, and establish new collaborations with research groups at other departments at Umeå University. The prioritised research area ranges from pure research to applied research and also integrates political and economical science approaches. The purpose is to foster a transition towards sustainable forestry and food production and consumption in the European Arctic (subarctic).
Selection process
The criteria to select priorities research areas are: research quality, subject breadth, potential to develop, and something that is characteristic for Umeå University or this region. The starting point were the 24 proposals that were suggested in the thematic discussions carried out by university researchers.
The selection of prioritised research areas has evolved from the work and thematic discussions that started in 2022 based on a Government proposition to allocate research funding to all higher education institutions based of specific profile areas. The Government has since changed its mind, but Umeå University has used this momentum to develop strategic work on strengthening research quality and competitiveness on a long-term scale.
