Connecting Researchers from Different Disciplines

If you are looking for inspiration, new research ideas, or cross-disciplinary collaboration, you have come to the right place.
You are passionate about working with researchers from other disciplines, but maybe you are still looking for the perfect match to complement your expertise, or you wish your research ideas were more novel. No matter what your situation is, you want your research to have a bigger impact and the journey more exciting.
Trust us, fellow researcher, we have been there.

Do you want to do more novel research? At Icelab, we believe that the most efficient recipe for this is to blend previously known ideas in new ways. Specifically, mixing up computational modeling, data-driven research and experiments. To achieve this we created icelab, a physical place where theoretical researchers from computer science, ecology, geology, mathematics, and physics work side by side.
Apart from our passion for interdisciplinary research, we see it as our mission to couple researchers that would benefit from each other’s work but don’t know about each other’s existence. Icelab runs activities to bridge this chasm.

We’re Icelab. The polestar of interdisciplinary research that connects researchers.

IceLab Research

Our Values

We want everyone to feel at home in IceLab.  A welcoming environment helps foster trust which improves the exchange of ideas, pivotal to maintaining a healthy interdisciplinary research team.

And we mean it! No boundaries.  We don’t care what your field of research is or your background, we are interested in sharing ideas and working together.

We approach our lives through the lens of science.  Ideas flow back and forth naturally.

Even though we have many disparate projects and research areas, we are all one team.  We feel free to approach anyone with a question or an idea.

IceLab is not only a place for us to work across disciplinary boundaries – we want to guide every scientist in our sphere so they can take the lessons we’ve learned about collaboration and bring them to their own research.

We’re an informal bunch who are serious about science. We think science is seriously fun and it should be enjoyable for all.

We believe in a flat working environment, without hierarchies or self importance that can get in the way of a true meeting of minds.  We’re interested in anyone’s ideas and questions and we’re genuinely curious about whatever you’re puzzling over.

Innovation comes as a natural consequence of the kind of science we’re doing.  Through open collaboration and a diversity of backgrounds, we avoid stagnation and allow true novelty to emerge.

We want to create a truly great research hub that will produce not only stellar research but also help other researchers to reach their fullest potential.

IceLab’s History

Why IceLab?

We created IceLab because we felt that the physical walls between departments prevented cross-disciplinary ideas from meeting and multiplying.

Launch

Inspired by the open culture among physicists and biologists at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, where several past and present IceLabers have spent PhDs or postdocs, in 2010 we built a physical lab space to share among ecologists, mathematicians, and physicists. Umeå University helped us to cover the reconstruction of dark, narrow corridors with researcher cells into a light, open space with diverse activity areas to foster idea generation.

Strong Research Environment

Through a strong research environment grant, we also received funding for two PIs and for setting up and running activities that connect researchers from different disciplines and generate new ideas.

IceLab Multidisciplinary Postdoctoral Program

Funded by the Kempe Foundations since 2020, IceLab launched an initiative to help researchers from different disciplines take their collaborative spark into a full research project with the help of a shared postdoctoral fellow. Since then, three postdocs have joined IceLab yearly under this program and the non-IceLab principal investigators working with them on the project became IceLab affiliates.

Excellence Center

Through a Swedish Research Council excellence center grant in 2024, IceLab received funding for two PIs, postdocs, a research school, international visiting researcher program and for activities to tackle the center’s theme, modeling adaptive mechanisms in living systems under stress.

IceLab today

We are roughly 30 researchers physically located at IceLab or in one of the nearby associated Umeå University departments, though our collaborative network extends far beyond.

We always look for new collaborative projects and think about ways to innovate our creative activities. Since we believe that the best formula for new ideas is to combine existing ideas, we look forward to hearing from you about your ideas or visions that you would like to realize.
If you are interested in our future activities, please stay tuned via LinkedIn, BlueSky or subscribe to our email list.

Who is in IceLab?

At present, we are about 30 researchers – Master’s students, PhDs postdocs, professors and affiliated researchers– with backgrounds in computer science, ecology, geology, mathematics, plant physiology, molecular biology and physics. All of us have a strong interest in mathematical or computational modeling, which make us ideal collaborators in multidisciplinary projects.

Meet the Team

Where did the name IceLab come from?

The name IceLab came about through the shortening of our full name, Integrated Science Lab.  We also happen to be located in the North of Sweden, which has crisp, white winters – hence, ice.

Research

IceLab scientists and collaborators are interested in a multitude of intersecting questions and ideas.  From community detection in networks to the origins of life and beyond, our research is diverse and ever expanding in breadth.  Get a sense of some of the projects under way in IceLab on our Research page.

READ ABOUT OUR RESEARCH

Collaboration Experiments

We want to infect everyone we meet with the desire to break out of their own research boundaries.  To that end, we continually design and experiment with different types of events to promote collaborative science.

THE COLLABORATIVE EVENT NEXUS

Support for IceLab

IceLab is funded by Umeå University broadly with further support from the departments of Ecology and Environmental Science, Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics, Physics, Plant Physiology and Molecular Biology. IceLab is also funded by external grants from the Swedish Research Council’s 2022 call for Centres of Research Excellence, the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, and Kempestiftelserna.