Research Council of Finland awards funding for 12 new Academy Research Fellows and Academy Projects in natural sciences and engineering
In total, the Research Council of Finland’s Scientific Council for Natural Sciences and Engineering selected 53 researchers to receive Academy Research Fellowship funding and 74 projects to receive Academy Project Funding. The new Academy Projects are composed of a total of 104 subprojects. The total funding comes to around €35 million for Academy Research Fellowships and around €50 million for Academy Projects.
In the Academy Research Fellowships, the success rate for applicants stood at roughly 14%, while in the case of Academy Projects, the success rate was about 15%.
New Academy Research Fellows at Tampere University
Academy Research Fellowship funding is intended for early-career researchers on a fast career track who have formed international networks and who are conducting scientifically high-quality and high-impact research that contributes to scientific renewal. Academy Research Fellowships were granted to the following researchers at Tampere University:
Philipp Müller: Prediction of Normalized and Homogenized Differential Mobility Spectrometry Measurements from Surgical Smoke in Varying Environmental Conditions
Solid cancer tumors such as breast cancer or brain tumors are frequently removed using electric knifes. The removal generates surgical smoke that can be measured by so-called differential mobility spectrometry devices. Based on these measurements cancerous tissue can be distinguished from healthy tissue to ensure that the whole tumor and only the tumor is removed The limitation for the current method is that it only works at some standard environmental conditions. Once temperature or humidity change, a reliable differentiation is impossible. The project will collect measurements from various tissue types at different temperatures and humidity levels to develop machine learning algorithms that allow to infer how measurements taken at any environmental settings would look like at standard conditions. This will allow faster and reliable identification of cancerous tissue during surgeries independent on the environmental conditions in the operating room. See the funding decision to read more about Philipp Müller’s research.
Caglar Genc: Playful Biomaterials (PLAY-BIO): Designing for More-than-Human Relations in Everyday Life
Imagine shadow guessing games with the light cast from bacteria and yeast growing in a bedside lamp. Or a game where we try to touch on and ‘soothe' vibrating mushroom floors. Would playing with these biomaterials (i.e., bacteria, mushrooms and wood) in our everyday life make them our social companions that we care for, and enjoy with, rather than simply seeing them as products that we consume? To address this question, the PLAY-BIO will create playful biomaterial designs that make us notice biomaterials in our everyday lives and realize that we are dependent on each other. It will, then, place them at homes and study what kind of relationships we can build with our playful companions. By doing so, it will show us the ways that biomaterials can be designed to change our perspective from only caring for our well-being to understanding we can survive only when we start caring for the non-human world. See the funding decision to read more about Caglar Genc’s research.
Erkka Frankberg: Introducing a Ductile Ceramic at Room Temperature (INDUCER)
Oxide glasses are an integral part of society, but their use is limited by their typical brittle fracture at room temperature. Glass materials, such as oxides, enable a wide range of tailored functional properties from insulators to semiconductors. They are transparent to visible light, have good chemical stability, and tolerate high temperatures. However, the brittle nature of glasses and ceramics at low temperature limits the flexible utilization of these materials in modern technologies, and therefore increasing their toughness has been one of the primary goals of materials science for decades. In this project, Dr. Erkka J. Frankberg combines disruptive manufacturing technology, basic physics research and cutting-edge experimental science to create new, fundamental information about the low-temperature plasticity phenomena of glass and ceramic materials. See the funding decision to read more about Erkka Frankberg’s research.
Kim Pöyhönen: Topology and Entanglement in Complex Quantum Systems
Entanglement is one of the most well-known and unintuitive features of quantum mechanics, involving separate quantum states being correlated so that each one cannot be described independently from the others to which it is entangled. Topological materials, which feature macroscopic quantum mechanical effects caused by their bulk topology ultimately due to entanglement, have risen to prominence within the field of condensed matter over the past few decades. The exotic properties of these materials are envisioned to revolutionize technology from energy storage to quantum computing. In his project, Pöyhönen will further explore both the general topic of entanglement and how to measure it, as well as how nontrivial topology is affected by the breaking of momentum conservation. See the funding decision to read more about Kim Pöyhönen’s research.
Tero-Petri Ruoko: Thermally Activated Delayed Fluorescence under Confinement in a Supramolecular Cage
Current state-of-the-art light-emitting molecules are based on thermally activated delayed fluorescence (TADF) dyes that have a structurally crowded and sterically hindered donor–acceptor architecture. TADF dyes are expensive, structurally complex, prone to aggregation-induced emission quenching, and the stability of especially blue emitters remains low. FLUOROCAGE aims to solve these issues and take a step towards next-generation light-emitting devices by confining the donor and acceptor building blocks of TADF dyes as heterodimers inside a water-soluble supramolecular cage, resulting in a highly emissive platform with modular tunability. The water-solubility of the supramolecular confined emitters reduces the environmental impact of device fabrication. The project aims to decouple TADF emission from the complex structural architecture, leading to a paradigm shift in the design of stable organic emitters. See the funding decision to read more about Tero-Petri Ruoko’s research.
New Academy Projects at Tampere University
The aim of Academy Project Funding is to promote the renewal and diversity of Finnish science and to improve the quality and the scientific and other impact of research. The aim is to attain internationally as high a scientific standard of work as possible and to support scientific breakthroughs and top-tier international research collaboration. The following projects received Academy Project Funding at Tampere University:
Esa Rahtu: BERMUDA: Spatial Artificial Intelligence for Visual Geometry and Immersion
The project considers immersive and structurally accurate modelling in computer vision under real-world and real-time constraints on consumer-grade hardware. The research team fuses camera motion estimation with geometric reconstruction and immersive deep modelling in a robust end-to-end fashion. The project leverages probabilistic methods and develops both data- and compute-efficient approaches. These are of particular importance in both non-human perception (such as drone navigation) that requires accurate structural knowledge and in immersive technologies such as augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) that require both structural accuracy and photorealism. See the funding decision to read more about Esa Rahtu’s research.
Elina Vuorimaa-Laukkanen: Novel 3D-Bioprintable and Injectable Tissue-Adhesive Biomaterials for Stimuli-Responsive Controlled Release of Therapeutic Agents (TIAD)
Three-dimensional (3D) bioprinting has become the state-of-the-art biofabrication technology to manufacture artificial tissues with the cellular architecture and spatial organization mimicking the native tissues. In 3D bioprinting, a bioink composing of cells and biomaterials is printed layer-by-layer on a pre-designed 3D model in automated and repeatable manner. Despite the promising potential of 3D bioprinting there is still lot to do before it can be applied in medical treatment. The project will develop new hyaluronic acid based biomaterials which can be used both as tissue adhesives and as bioinks. The biomaterials will be embedded with therapeutic agents for controlled stimuli responsive drug release and combined with extracellular matrix proteins. Injectability and bioprintability of the adhesive will be evaluated in the presence and absence of cells. The emphasis is on developing fully biocompatible and biodegradable systems which are ready for pre-clinical testing. See the funding decision to read more about Elina Vuorimaa-Laukkanen’s research.
Konstantinos Stefanidis: ALTER: Fairness, Explanations, and Interactivity in Automated Decision Systems
ALTER aims to advance research in the intersection of explainability, fairness, and user interaction in the domain of automated decision systems. ALTER will design methods to (1) provide explanations capable of conveying fairness aspects, (2) audit the system to examine fairness and discover latent source of bias via explanations, (3) semi-automatically intervene to ensure system fairness, and (4) interact with users to facilitate and guide the aforementioned scenarios. ALTER will cover the needs of different stakeholders, such as consumers of recommendations, providers/producers of data items to be recommended, and system owners, who may have a varying level of familiarity and expertise with the system and the underlying AI technologies. The research will be materialized via open source libraries and tools within the ALTER framework, supporting the execution of user interactive explanation, fairness auditing and fairness correction pipelines on recommendation results. See the funding decision to read more about Konstantinor Stefanidis's research.
Teemu Ojanen: Many-body physics in the quantum information era
Quantum simulation and computing are emerging fields that hold great promise for advancing various domains of science and society. These fields have attracted the attention of many scientists, entrepreneurs, and investors who are curious about the capabilities and applications of this technology. The quantum devices available today, with 50-100 operational qubits, are still limited in their computational power, but they can offer a preview of the future possibilities. One of the first goals of quantum computing is to achieve breakthroughs in the understanding of fundamental physics of complex quantum systems. The project investigates the quantum information aspects of conventional many-body systems, as well as the physics of emerging quantum devices, to address some of the most important questions in quantum simulation and quantum information at the moment. See the funding decision to read more about Teemu Ojanen's research.
Laeticia Petit: Light emitting 3D printed bioactive scaffold embedded in hydrogel for maxillofacial bone healing with limited risk of infection
Despite the scientific progress in developing biomaterials, there is still a need for biomaterials able to favor osteogenesis and angiogenesis while preventing implant failure arising from infections. Despite the scientific progress in developing biomaterials, there is still a need for biomaterials able to favor osteogenesis and angiogenesis while preventing implant failure arising from infections. We propose to develop novel composites, composed of a glass host, hydrogel, crystals with blue upconversion (UC) using 800nm and particles with green persistent luminescence (PeL). The UC is used to charge the PeL particles. The green afterglow obtained using the tissue-penetrating near-IR light will activate, in-situ, photoswitchable molecule loaded in the composite leading to the release of an antimicrobial agent. See the funding decision to read more about Laeticia Petit’s research.
Jonathan Massera: Light emitting 3D printed bioactive scaffold embedded in hydrogel for maxillofacial bone healing with limited risk of infection (PHOTOheal)
Despite the scientific progress in developing biomaterials, there is still a need for biomaterials able to favor osteogenesis and angiogenesis while preventing implant failure arising from infections. Despite the scientific progress in developing biomaterials, there is still a need for biomaterials able to favor osteogenesis and angiogenesis while preventing implant failure arising from infections. We propose to develop novel composites, composed of a glass host, hydrogel, crystals with blue upconversion (UC) using 800nm and particles with green persistent luminescence (PeL). The UC is used to charge the PeL particles. The green afterglow obtained using the tissue-penetrating near-IR light will activate, in-situ, photoswitchable molecule loaded in the composite leading to the release of an antimicrobial agent. See the funding decision to read more about Jonathan Massera’s research.
Tapio Niemi: Integrated optical vortex comb
Polarization is a fundamental property of light, corresponding to the spin angular momentum of photons in the quantum picture. Additionally, photons can carry orbital angular momentum (OAM). The number of possible OAM states of light is in theory infinite, allowing one to encode substantial amounts of information in light. In addition to applications in communication and information technologies, OAM-carrying light is intriguing from the fundamental point of view. Niemi and his team will develop a novel integrated photonic system for generating and detecting laser light beams that can carry hundreds or even thousands of OAM modes. Using such extraordinary light, they will also introduce a new method for the chemical analysis of gases and liquids. See the funding decision to read more about Tapio Niemi’s research.
To read more, see the Research Council of Finland’s press release dated 14 June 2024
