Keynote Speakers

Carl Wieman, Professor of Physics and Education at Stanford University

Carl Wieman is a Professor of Physics and Education at Stanford University. Wieman has been widely recognized for his experimental research in both physics (Nobel Prize 2001) and university science and engineering education (Carnegie University Professor of the Year 2004, Yidan International Prize for Education Research 2020). He founded PhET, which provides interactive simulations that are used nearly a million times a day to learn science, and he has published a book “Improving how universities teach science” He is studying problem-solving expertise in science and engineering and how this can be better measured and taught.

Taking a Scientific Approach to Science Education

Guided by experimental tests of theory and practice, science and engineering have advanced rapidly in the past 500 years. Guided primarily by tradition and dogma, education in these subjects has remained largely medieval. Recent research on how people learn, combined with careful experiments in university classrooms, is now revealing much more effective ways to teach and evaluate learning than is currently used in most classes. I will discuss these results and what they tell us about principles of learning and their effective implementation in science courses. This research is setting the stage for a new approach to teaching that can provide the relevant and effective science education for all students that is needed for the 21st century. It also shows better ways to evaluate teaching quality.

Halla Hrund Logadóttir, Director General of the National Energy Authority in Iceland

Halla Hrund is a former director of the Iceland School of Energy at Reykjavík University. She has a BA degree in political science, a master's degree in international cooperation with an emphasis on economics and energy and a master's degree in public administration from Harvard University with an emphasis on environmental and energy issues. 

Halla Hrund has worked since 2017 as a co-founder and CEO of the Arctic Initiative at Harvard University, which focuses on e.g. the impact of climate change, and also teaches at the master's level at the same institution. Since 2019, she has co-directed the mapping of changes in the Arctic, e.g. Energy, at the World Economic Forum. Halla Hrund has since 2015 worked as the founder and chairman of the Arctic Innovation Lab and worked as a mentor in various energy-related innovation accelerators.

Geir Egil Dahle Øien professor at the Department of Electronic Systems at The Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)

Geir Egil Dahle Øien (born 1965) is a professor at the Department of Electronic Systems, which is organized under the Faculty of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering at The Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). Øien has an MSc (sivilingeniør) degree from the Department of Telecommunications at The Norwegian Institute of Technology (1989), and a PhD from the same department (1993). He became a professor at NTNU's Department of Electronics and Telecommunications in May 2001 and belongs to the Signal Processing Group. He was head of the NTNU's Department of Telecommunications in the period 2002-2004, and Dean of the university's Faculty of Information Technology, Mathematics and Electrical Engineering between 1 August 2009 and 31 July 2019.

Øien was project manager for NTNU's central education development project "Technology Education of the Future" (FTS) in the period 1 August 2019 - to 31 December 2021. He is author/co-author of around 150 publications in international journals and conference proceedings with referees. He has managed and participated in several large research projects funded by the Research Council of Norway and the EU Commission, has supervised more than 20 PhD candidates and has been an opponent of a long list of PhD defences, in Norway and abroad. In 2022 he is a guest researcher at Aarhus University.

Photo: TerraVera/Thor Brødreskift