How Sweden squanders its most important talent – Part 2: The Contribution of Foreign PhD Students: A Case Study

Having established Sweden as an attractive destination for foreign students to pursue a PhD, an interesting follow up is to see their contribution to Swedish research. This blog post focuses on a case study at the Department of Information Technology here at Uppsala University to have an overview of their work, highlighting the importance of diversity in academia.

A Case Study at the Department of Information Technology in Uppsala University

At the Department of Information Technology at Uppsala University, roughly 40% of PhD graduates were non-European between the years 2018-2020 (Uppsala University, 2022). On top of this, non-European doctoral students are highly contributing in the published articles in prestigious journals. PhD students at the IT department produced roughly 120 manuscripts per year as depicted in Figure 1. Out of these around 40% of the manuscripts, between 2016-2020, had at least one non-European contributing author. Figure 1 – right shows the trend of growing percentage of non-European contributing authors in the published articles in the recent years.

Their publications gain great popularity concluding in high number of citations. It is without any doubt that international PhD students are essential for the research conducted at Uppsala University. They collaborate with prestigious universities and achieve exceptional impact showing extraordinary amounts of citations from other scientists. Let’s showcase some of the most cited articles including foreign PhD students.

With 332 citations, “SPICE: A sparse covariance-based estimation method for array processing (Stoica et al., 2010)” is an article published in 2010 which includes Prabhu Babu, an Indian PhD student at the time working in electrical engineering applications in signal processing at the Department of Information Technology. They developed an approach that has been afterwards used broadly for signal processing and communications.

A more recent paper from 2020 that has already got 169 citations entitled “Artificial intelligence for diagnosis and grading of prostate cancer in biopsies: a population-based, diagnostic study (Ström et al., 2020)” includes Leslie Solorzano. She is a recently graduated PhD student from Colombia who contributed to this work which uses an Artificial Intelligence system to detect prostate cancer with a performance comparable to that of international experts in prostate pathology.

References

Stoica, P., Babu, P., & Li, J. (2010, Nov 01). SPICE: A Sparse Covariance-Based Estimation Method for Array Processing. IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, 59(2), 629 – 638. 10.1109/TSP.2010.2090525

Ström, P., Kartasalo, K., Olsson, H., Solorzano, L., Delahunt, B., & at al., .. (2020, Feb). Artificial intelligence for diagnosis and grading of prostate cancer in biopsies: a population-based, diagnostic study. The Lance Oncology, 21(2), 222-232. 10.1016/S1470-2045(19)30738-7

Uppsala University. (2022). IT department. https://www.uu.se/en

Having established Sweden as an attractive destination for foreign students to pursue a PhD, an interesting follow up is to see their contribution to Swedish research. This blog post focuses on a case study at the Department of Information Technology here at Uppsala University to have an overview of their work, highlighting the importance of…