Lars Holst: An Executive Summary
Employment and Background
Lars Holst is a Swedish citizen living in Malmö, southern Sweden, where he also grew up.
He is employed as a Ph.D. candidate in Operations Research at the Division of Robotics, Lund Institute of Technology (LTH) where his research is focused on developing methodologies to increase the benefits of using discrete-event simulation (DES) in manufacturing system development.
Before coming to the Division of Robotics, Lars completed a year of mandatory military service, a Masters Degree in Mechanical Engineering at LTH and a semester of National Economics at Lund University. His Master's Thesis focused on the challenges facing SMEs in the Japanese manufacturing industry, and was based on visits to 20 companies in Japan.
The findings showed that most of the visited companies were still struggling in the wake of the bubble economy that burst in the early 1990s, but also that many were changing their operations and business models in interesting ways.
Lars has since returned for two research visits, in 1999 and 2000 respectively, thanks to scholarships from the Swedish Institute and the Sweden-Japan Foundation.
Interests and Activities
When not exercising, designing websites or pretending to be studying Japanese, Lars spends most of his free time as the founding Chairman of EWB-Lund, the Lund Chapter of Engineers Without Borders (EWB) - Sweden, and as a Director of EWB-Sweden.
He thinks of himself as a socially skilled geek, a strong communicator and a perfcetionist.
Lars can be contacted via a contact form or by phone: .
About this Website
Lars developed this website because he needed a place to archive and share various kinds of digital information with friends, business contacts, and total strangers. He also saw this as an opportunity to play around with web standards and the wonders of css, xhtml and php.
In late 2003, Lars launched a personal weblog. He thought this would be an interesting way to solve his information management problems, while at the same time improve his writing skills. The main focus of the weblog is on technology, business, and web design, but topics may cover any- and everything else of interest, including art, architecture, design, film, photography, travel, culture, cooking and coffee. Efforts will also be made to highlight human rights issues and discuss how technology and science can help build a sustainable society in disadvantaged communities.