Academic family reunion

 .

My "academic family tree" with my supervisor, my "siblings" and our (current) ph.d. students.

We organised an academic family reunion. It all started with a flippant mid-November conversation at an after work pub near KTH. Me, Annika and Rémy talked about my friend and ph.d. colleague Christer Garbis who moved to the United States 20 years ago and who would visit Sweden over Christmas and New Year. Chatting about this, we realised that Christer was their long-lost never-seen "academic uncle" - since both Christer and their supervisor Henrik Artman had the same supervisor - Yvonne Wærn - when they were ph.d. students. Annika even "knew" Christer through reading academic articles that Christer had co-authored together with her supervisor Henrik and their advisor Yvonne back in the days. Since Yvonne was also my supervisor, I too was their "academic uncle". After having stated this, the idea started to grow that perhaps we should organise a get-together (academic family reunion) with Christer, Yvonne and all her academic "children" and "grandchildren" at KTH. 

Yvonne Wærn was a professor of (cognitive) psychology at Stockholm University before she moved to Linköping and the interdisciplinary department of communication studies where Henrik, me and Christer (in that order) did our doctoral studies. But besides the three younger "sons", Yvonne already had two academic "daughters" from Stockholm University who also works at KTH; Cecilia Katzeff and Ann Lantz. Yvonne retired more than 20 years ago and none of us had met her for ages. So we started to plan a get-together in my home. To this we added "the younger generation"; Cecilia's, Henrik's and my 8 current ph.d. students Sofie, Arjun, Joe, Jukka, Annika, Rémy, Aksel and Minna (see the family tree above). 

We planned the day (Monday Jan 6) and the time around what would work for Yvonne who is 89 years old and lives in Linköping (and who would have to take the train to go to Stockholm). Unfortunately not everyone could attend the family reunion - Ann had a prior commitment that day, Joe was in Amsterdam and Minna doesn't live in Stockholm could not attend. Perhaps worse was that Yvonne, who had already bought a train ticket, had the bad luck of falling and breaking her arm, making it impossible for her to go to Stockholm. She instead had to make a "guest appearance" through FaceTime. Besides Yvonne and the four ph.d. students of hers and our six current ph.d. students, mine and Christer's wives also attended (my wife in fact worked together with Yvonne 20+ years ago when she had just arrived to Sweden). 

And it turned out to be a lovely event! To make things simple, it was neither a lunch nor a dinner event, but rather just a daytime potluck cocktail party (with finger food). Everyone prepared something and me and Tessy offered up our home as well as drinks and my special spicy guacamole. It really wasn't a lot of work, but the outcome was spectacular and it was so nice to "meet up" with Yvonne. While Yvonne more or less quit academia cold turkey the day she retired, she had the exact same enthusiasm and curiosity we all remember from when we were her ph.d. students. She also asked (interrogated) us about many different things including our current research and our views of the current AI boom/hype. She worked on AI decades ago and while it was under a different paradigm, she keeps up also after having been retired for 20+ years (this could also have something to do with the fact that her daughter Annika is a professor of computer science at Uppsala University). Yvonne also shared some advice to our ph.d. students, some gossip and we also unfortunately found out "Cecilia was her favourite" :-)

I can very much recommend others to organise an academic family reunion. This was a very informal event, Yvonne has supervised other ph.d. students both in Stockholm and in Linköping, but we were happy to limit this event to only people who work at KTH (with a "guest appearance" from Christer who was our MacGuffin - "an object, device, or event that is necessary to the plot and the motivation of the characters, but insignificant, unimportant, or irrelevant in itself"). Christer, who was the "prime mover" and the reason we got together, just had time to chat for a short while with Yvonne before he left and went to Amazon's Stockholm office to "attend a 6-hour meeting in Phoenix, Arizona". But all in all, a lovely social event and a really nice afternoon/evening!

Yvonne and her "academic grand-children"; ph.d. students Arjun, Aksel and Sofie in my home.

.