He had never studied and travelled the world - now Sebastian is a PhD student in Alnarp

Sebastian Carlsson attended upper secondary school with a music specialisation and then applied to folk high school to continue on the path to a career as a rock star. When he wasn't accepted, it was so hard that he didn't want to study at all and started living a travelling life. He's been a street musician, a volunteer at an orphanage in Peru, a street vendor for Unicef in New Zealand and sold guitars on Denmark Street in London.

- One weekend I went on holiday and missed selling a guitar to Brad Pitt. I tried to live my dream life outside the norms and have always followed my gut. That's what brought me here in the end too.

Together with his wife, Sebastian moved to Gothenburg to study when he ran out of options. After starting with a course in neuropsychology, he added psychology and anthropology. He ended up with a bachelor's degree in social anthropology in Lund.

- I became interested in the different ways people think and act and how we function as a group. It's great to understand neuropsychological explanations of how things work, but a lot of it is irrelevant to ordinary people. It is the opposite of social science. In the end, I was completely sold on anthropology.

Almost immediately after graduating with a Master's degree in Anthropology from Lund University, Sebastian started as a PhD student at SLU, five years after taking his first university credits. His PhD project consists of two parts, in the ongoing FOODCoST project and the new Surfit. The aim of the thesis is to be able to combine and see the benefits of the results of the two projects.

- FOODCoST tries to get a holistic picture of the entire food network, production and sales with a focus on negative externalities. This is something that is almost ignored in economics. They don't take into account that a banana farmer in Nicaragua working with pesticides can get cancer at the age of 40. Why shouldn't that be part of the calculation?

- At Surfit, we'll be looking at sustainable food networks and how they can be scaled up. On a smaller scale, things can work well but we need food on a large scale.

In addition to starting a new job, Sebastian Carlsson has also taken the opportunity to move from Malmö to Södra Sandby with his wife and two children. He is a Japan fanatic and thinks the perfect garden has a waterfall and is full of bamboo. Music is also still important to both the whole family.

- ‘Tom Waits’ Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards is the best album in the world,’ says Sebastian Carlsson.