On exchange with eSSENCE: Filip Szczepankiewicz

Filip Szczepankiewicz, Associate Professor in Medical Radiation Physics at Lund University, participated in an exchange visit through the eSSENCE exchange program. During his stay at Uppsala University, he collaborated with Jens Sjölund, Associate Professor at the Department of Information Technology. After completing the visit, we took the opportunity to ask Filip a few questions about his experiences and reflections on the exchange.

How has the eSSENCE Exchange collaboration contributed to your network?

The most important connection has been to Jens Sjölund at Uppsala University. Although this is a colleague that predates my eSSENCE grants, it has been maintained and rekindled by support from eSSENCE. Specifically, we performed a two-way exchange (He visited Lund, and I and a student, visited him for a few days).

Other contacts have been made possible through the scientific presentations, however, they also elucidate the fact that we are fairly “alone” in our topic (medical radiation physics). This does not mean that we cannot enjoy or learn from the other eSSENCE projects, but it does pose a challenge.

Therefore, it is valuable to us that collaborations with other eSSENCE universities are encouraged.

How has the collaboration contributed to your research?

The collaboration has made it possible to plan projects and grant applications that would otherwise not be possible. Specifically, our travel to Uppsala spawned an idea for a project that was submitted as a grant proposal to eSSENCE@LU in 2025. In a sense, this project is in a very early stage, but is quite promising and closely related to eSSENCE.

From a different perspective, eSSENCE has made it feasible for us to pursue slightly fringe ideas that are far too theoretical and technical for our “ordinary” grant givers. In our field, we apply to agencies like the Swedish Cancer Society, who have a limited appetite for projects that are purely technical in nature. In this sense, the eSSENCE project and travel grants have motivated us to promote these ideas; ideas that are otherwise orphaned and forgotten (despite their importance).

What do you hope the collaboration will lead to in the long term?

With support from eSSENCE we will be able to organize researchers across disciplines to translate methods from a theoretical and technical stage to actual use in a clinical research setting. The early funding from eSSENCE gives us resources to legitimize ideas and implement them as mature tools in clinical or pre-clinical use. Once this is done, it carries great value even in the eyes of more clinical reviewers and grant agencies. In a way, I appreciate the way that eSSENCE has seeded our clinical research that is too technical for the clinical crowd.

The long-term result that I hope for is a (semi-)stable environment where we can pursue a wide range of basic science projects (at least relatively speaking) that demand the cooperation of multiple disciplines.

I am fortunate to already have a collaboration like this with Jens Sjölund. Although it has historically been unfunded, grants like eSSENCE is a force multiplier for our group.