VTI is recruiting for a new office in Skellefteå

She’s here – Pia Kristiansson, a newly employed researcher whose job it is to develop VTI’s operations in Norrland. “There’s a great deal of potential in northern Sweden, and everything is easier when you’re actually there,” she says.

Pia Kristiansson will be starting work on 3 March and spending most of her first week on induction at head office in Linköping. After that, she’ll be working from her office at the premises of the Arctic Centre for Energy, ACE, on Campus Skellefteå.

This means that our new VTI colleague will have to move to Skellefteå from her home in Storuman, 230 kilometres away, but she’ll still be working in the same county.

“VTI is getting closer to Norrland, and I’m very much looking forward to the assignment. Skellefteå is located between Umeå and Luleå, and there’s a great deal of potential for developing operations throughout northern Sweden. It’s always easier when you’re actually there and can meet and talk to various partners directly,” says Pia Kristiansson.

Her assignment includes both working with existing projects and developing and strengthening VTI’s operations in northern Sweden. This means generating new projects, attracting external funding and starting collaborations with new partners. These duties overlap, but formally half of the position falls within ACE’s e-mobility work and half falls within VTI’s other research activities.

Pia Kristiansson joins us from a position as project manager at Region Västerbotten. She worked mostly on healthcare-related issues in the first few years, but gradually shifted more towards the field of transport.

“I’ve seen the immense benefits that transport brings to society, especially in sparsely populated areas and for social cohesion. Good transport can overcome distances and obstacles that geography would otherwise impose,” she says.

In particular, Pia Kristiansson has worked extensively with autonomous transport and drones: technologies that, when used correctly, can make life easier in rural areas. As part of the Morgondagens brevduvor (Carrier Pigeons of Tomorrow) project, which she led, trials were conducted where drones delivered medicines, allowing people to avoid long journeys to a pharmacy.

This work led to the wider Living Lab project Smart landsbygd (Smart Rural Area), where goods in addition to than medications are transported autonomously. This also heralded the start of a collaboration with VTI.

“At VTI, I’ll be continuing to lead various drone projects. One of the things we’re looking at is resilience, how drones are affected by winter climates with temperatures down to 30 degrees below zero. Not much has been done in the past.”

Pia Kristiansson’s family has deep roots in the Storuman area. Her father was the first person in the village – where most people worked in agriculture and forestry – to graduate from university, which many people thought was a bit odd. Her father travelled almost a thousand kilometres to Uppsala, studied to become a teacher and later became headmaster.

His daughter Pia’s CV also includes a university education, working for many years as a self-employed business owner and CEO, and working at Umeå University. Whatever the assignment, project management and networking have been a common theme running through her professional live.

Translation: CBG

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