The Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford University is pleased to announce a new fellowship partnership with Linköping University (LiU), a public research university whose main campus is based in Linköping, Sweden.
Under a memorandum of understanding, signed in May 2025, LiU will support one LiU-CASBS Fellow per year in residence at CASBS, for an initial period of six years, starting with the 2026-27 academic year. Additional fellows from LiU may be considered in a given year on a space-available basis. The agreement was signed by Sarah Soule, the Sara Miller McCune Director of CASBS, and Per-Olof Brehmer, the Vice-rector of Collaboration and Strategic Development at Linköping University.
At its core, the CASBS-LiU partnership will cultivate and promote interdisciplinary social and behavioral science research. Notably, however, under the agreement and separate from any individual fellowship, the signatory parties may also consider collaboration on chosen topics with the purpose of coauthoring articles and/or books. They may also arrange joint workshops, in-person or online, within areas relevant to CASBS and LiU. Finally, the parties also may consider pursuing joint applications for external funding.
The new agreement with LiU deepens the Center’s global outreach efforts that result in an annual influx of international talent. The agreement’s signing, moreover, constitutes both a bookend and a capstone for Sarah Soule, who concludes her service at CASBS on June 15.
“It’s clear that we’re more likely to achieve breakthroughs and advance understandings through collaborations and partnerships – and the more geographically expansive those collaborations and partnerships are, the better,” said Soule. “LiU-CASBS Fellows will enrich and amplify the range of intellectual and cultural perspectives found within each fellowship cohort at CASBS, and we expect this will beneficially impact the quality of research and thought leadership all fellows produce. I’m just so delighted to see the partnership with Linköping University come to fruition during my tenure at CASBS.”
Linköping University, for its part, has become known for its facilitation of multi-disciplinary work and interdisciplinary-themed research and education across its four campuses and faculties. In terms of its internationalization, LiU actively collaborates to help solve contemporary regional, national, and global challenges with 400 universities in 50 countries. It already sends two LiU students each year to study at Stanford University. In 2025, the San Francisco Bay Area is among five geographical regions it is prioritizing for further research collaborations.
"CASBS is something completely unique and combines the meeting among different disciplines with the location itself," said Matts Karlsson, Linköping University's Vice-rector for Research. "LiU researchers are now given the opportunity to stay in this creative, stimulating, and international environment."
Each year, LiU will disseminate a call for applications and draw from the university’s system-wide pool of social and behavioral science scholars. As with the Center’s other international fellowship agreements, each prospective fellow will undergo a double vetting – in this case, first through LiU’s own selection process and then through the same evaluation process that CASBS applies to all its fellowship applicants. The application cycle that will yield the inaugural LiU-CASBS Fellow (2026-27 academic year) opens in August and ends in November 2025.
The catalyst who deserves credit for the initial fellowship partnership idea is Adel Daoud, a senior associate professor at LiU with affiliations at its Institute for Analytical Sociology and its Department of Management and Engineering. Daoud spent the 2023-24 academic year as a CASBS fellow, fully immersing himself in the fellowship experience as one of the Center’s most engaged community members. Daoud’s early enthusiasm and envisioning of possibilities helped precipitate action, and at a relatively swift pace.
“I’m delighted to have helped forge this connection between Linköping and CASBS and applaud Sarah Soule and the LiU Vice-Chancellor team, whose vision and leadership made this partnership possible,” said Adel Daoud. “I see great potential; both LiU and CASBS are all about breaking down silos and moving beyond established disciplines in service of creating room for innovation. I am deeply enthusiastic about this partnership and have high expectations for what it may produce.”
In May 2024, Daoud, Sarah Soule, CASBS deputy director Sally Schroeder, and Åsa Wallin, Innovation Adviser at LiU Innovation, met at CASBS to discuss how a partnership might take shape. About a month later, a larger LiU delegation descended upon CASBS for tours, conversations with CASBS fellows, and to further refine a prospective partnership agenda. The delegation included Jan-Ingvar Jönsson, Vice-Chancellor; Matts Karlsson, Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Research; Johan Ölvander, Dean of the Faculty of Science and Engineering; Martin Hallbeck, Deputy Dean of Research in the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences; Ulf Melin, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences; Maria Engelmark, Head of the International Affairs and Collaborations Division; and Margareta Alfredson, Senior Coordinator for developing collaborations in the Bay Area.
Sarah Soule and Sally Schroeder visited Linköping University in October 2024, meeting at various times with many of the same LiU principals who had visited CASBS, along with other faculty and administrators. Among the faculty members were four former CASBS fellows: Ali Ahmed (2013-14), Bengt Sandin (2006-07), Steve Woolgar (2013-14), and Adel Daoud (by this time himself a former fellow).
By late winter/early spring 2025, the main contours of the fellowship agreement had been delineated.
The partnership with LiU is the Center’s second with an institution in Sweden. In 2023, CASBS signed an agreement with the Riksbankens Jubileumfond (RJ), an independent foundation in Sweden devoted to promoting and supporting research in the social sciences and humanities. That partnership is part of a wider collaboration between RJ and CASBS, L’Institut d’études avancées de Paris (IEA de Paris), and the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (STIAS) in South Africa. CASBS also enjoys international fellowship partnerships with The Science and Technology Policy Research and Information Center within the National Applied Research Laboratories of Taiwan (a federal government agency), the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the National University of Singapore, and the Korea Foundation for Advanced Studies.
CASBS thanks Linköping University for permission to display its logo