Author: Jessica Jewell

Last Friday, I had the honour of giving the toast at the Inauguration dinner for new Professors at Chalmers. The evening was in a word magical. A unique opportunity to see our colleagues and friends trade their office attire for tails and ball gowns. But even more it was an opportunity to celebrate Chalmers: the faculty, the leadership and the next generation. A few people have asked me for the full toast. Here it is below.

It’s a great honour to speak here today. I moved to Chalmers seven years ago from Vienna, a city that is ranked year after year as one of the best places to live. When I told people I was leaving Vienna for Gothenburg, the reactions were mixed. My friends couldn’t understand it. Why would anyone trade Vienna’s coffee houses, concert halls, and warm summer nights on the Danube for what my mother called, the frozen north? My colleagues were equally baffled. I was leaving a think tank at the heart of the IPCC for a university that most of them would have struggled to find on a map.

But it was the warnings that stuck with me. Two things, repeated by almost everyone who knew Sweden: the people are cold, they said. And then, lowering their voices as if sharing a secret, Jantelagen: the deep cultural discomfort with standing out, with thinking you’re something special. How could you do science in a society where expressing excellence is bad manners?

Luckily the skeptics were wrong. On all counts.

I found Gothenburg to be one of the best-kept secrets. I have fallen in love with this city: with the sea, the lakes, circus at Storateatern, and yes, with the people. The warmth here is real. I first felt it when I came for my interview. One of those dark, rainy November days that we all love. I had barely walked in the door when the chair of the recruitment committee, a woman I had never met, greeted me with a hug.

Now, most of us will spend more of our waking hours at work than anywhere else. More time here than at home, more time with colleagues than with family. When you stop to think about it that’s very strange. It means the question of who you work with, is not a small question. It shapes who we are, who we become.

What I found at Chalmers, and what I didn’t expect to find, is an environment that is both human and ambitious. Those two things don’t always come together. I’ve worked in places where being kind meant difficult projects were never done, difficult things were never said. And I’ve worked in places where ambition meant that people were dispensable.

Chalmers is neither. Here, I am pushed to do my best work. To ask the hard questions. To be difficult, in the best sense of that word. And I don’t have to leave my humanity at the door. That combination is rarer than it should be. And I don’t take it for granted. Many of the people who have shaped my path here and made me feel this way are in this room today. You know who you are. Thank you.

Now we all do this work against a particular backdrop. The world outside this room is not always easy to look at. My own country is a reminder that things we took for granted can, in fact, be threatened and even lost. Which makes it worth pausing to appreciate where we are. In Sweden, trust in universities remains high — remarkably high, actually. We rank third among all institutions in public trust. Behind only the police and Systembolaget.

But beneath the laughter is something real. When expertise is questioned and institutions are fragile, the fact that people still trust what happens in places like this one is something to build on. It is an invitation to show what science, done honestly and in good faith, can still offer the world.

And then there are the students, the postdocs, and the next generation of researchers coming through this place. They give me something I didn’t expect to feel: real hope and real joy. Their energy, their seriousness, their ideas, their questions, their refusal to be cynical given everything — that makes the work feel worth doing. Not just for its own sake, but for them. Some of them are in this room tonight. Thank you, you make this job what it is.

So this toast is to us — to the faculty, to our leadership, to all our colleagues who make this place what it is, to everyone who chose Chalmers when they could have chosen somewhere else. But even more, it is to those who will come after us. To the next generation who will one day stand where we are standing. To the researchers who will ask questions we haven’t thought to ask yet. To the people who will, I hope, be as surprised as I was by what they find here.

To Chalmers. And to what comes next.

Skål.