Tenured Professors’ Installation Lectures
Aalto University celebrates tenured professors with popular lectures by the new tenure track professors of Associate or Full level.
All lectures will be held in English and are open for everyone: professors, students, faculty, staff, and the public.
The multidisciplinary lectures will be followed by a reception hosted by Ilkka Niemelä, the President of Aalto University.
Welcome!
Lecturers and topics:
“Emergence of novelty in markets and industries”
Nina Granqvist
Department of Management Studies, School of Business
“Soft power strategies in ambiguous firm environments”
Robin Gustafsson
Department of Industrial Engineering and Management, School of Science
“Less is more in power conversion”
Marko Hinkkanen
Department of Electrical Engineering and Automation, School of Electrical Engineering
“Using movies as real-life like stimuli during neuroimaging to study the neural basis of social cognition”
Iiro Jääskeläinen
Department of Neuroscience and Biomedical Engineering, School of Science
“Competition law in the digital age”
Petri Kuoppamäki
Department of Accounting, School of School of Business
“Automatic recognition of human speech”
Mikko Kurimo
Department of Signal Processing and Acoustics, School of Electrical Engineering
“Health promotive urban environment”
Marketta Kyttä
Department of Built Environment, School of Engineering
“Industrial catalysis looks to the future”
Yongdan Li
Department of Chemical and Metallurgical Engineering, School of Chemical Engineering
“Computational biology”
Harri Lähdesmäki
Department of Computer Science, School of Science
“Visualizing time”
Masood Masoodian
Department of Media, School of Arts, Design and Architecture
“Water-repellent surfaces: slippery and never wet”
Robin Ras
Department of Applied Physics, School of Science
“Learning from nature: biomaterials for photonics”
Zhipei Sun
Department of Electronics and Nanoengineering, School of Electrical Engineering
Programme updated 13 Nov (pdf)
Postponed:
“Large-size high-speed trimaran ships”
Zhi Zong
Department of Mechanical Engineering, School of Engineering
Nina Granqvist (born 1976, Finland) received her D.Sc. (Econ.) degree from Helsinki School of Economics in 2007. After the three-year period as an Academy of Finland post-doctoral scholar, she worked as Assistant Professor at Hanken School of Economics, and spent a semester as a visiting scholar at the University of Cambridge.
Her research is driven by the quest to understand how ideas and products move from margins to mainstream. She has received some key prizes in the field of management (Roland Calori Prize, EGOS Best Paper Award) on her studies addressing the emergence of nanotechnology.
Since joining Aalto in 2014, she has continued to publish her work in the key journals and engaged in novel cross-school research collaborations. She serves as a member of the Executive Committee of the Organization and Management Theory Division at the Academy
of Management. She also engages with incumbent companies to consult on aspects of commercialization and on entering to new markets.
Nina Granqvist, D.Sc. (Econ.), has been appointed Professor of organization and management at the Aalto University School of Business on 20 April 2017.
Robin Gustafsson (born 1971, Finland) received his D.Sc. (Tech.) degree in technology strategy and venturing from Aalto University in 2010. Previously, he worked as senior technology advisor at Tekes, the Finnish National Technology and Innovation Agency. He was a postdoctoral research fellow at Stanford University during 2013–2014. Before taking up his current position, Gustafsson has worked as Acting Professor, CEMS Academic Director, and Head of International Business Discipline at Aalto University, School of Business.
His research focuses on strategic reasoning, strategic action, innovation, and organizing by firms during industry disruptions caused by advances in technology, i.e. digital technologies, energy technologies, and metals and engineering. His research has provided insights into how industry environments develop during disruptions, how managers make sense of them, and how astute managers can shape industry environment conditions to their advantage. Gustafsson's research has been published in top tier journals, such as Academy of Management Journal, International Journal of Management Reviews, Research Policy, Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Technological Forecasting and Social Change, and Organization Studies. He received the 2017 Emerald Literati Network Awards for Excellence as outstanding author contribution.
He teaches advanced courses in strategy, platform strategy, digital strategy, and innovation strategy at the masters, doctoral, and executive level.
Robin Gustafsson, D.Sc. (Tech.), has been appointed Professor of strategic management at the Aalto University School of Science on 22 May 2017.
Marko Hinkkanen (born 1975, Finland) received his D.Sc. (Tech.) degree in electrical engineering from Helsinki University of Technology, Finland, in 2004. He was an Acting Professor in Helsinki University of Technology in 2006–2008 and a Visiting Professor at Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Spain, in 2013–2014 and at Politecnico di Torino, Italy, in 2016.
In his research, Hinkkanen focuses on electric drives and power converters, with emphasis on developing their control methods. He has authored more than 100 scientific papers, of which 35 are in IEEE journals. He was the recipient of the 2016 International Conference on Electrical Machines (ICEM) Brian J. Chalmers Best Paper Award and the 2016 IEEE Industry Applications Society Industrial Drives Committee Best Paper Award.
Professor Hinkkanen is an Editorial Board Member of IET Electric Power Applications. He has regularly served as a reviewer for IEEE and IET journals (about 200 completed reviews) and as a topic chair of many conferences. He is a general chair of the IEEE 9th International Symposium on Sensorless Control for Electrical Drives (SLED), to be held in Helsinki in 2018.
Marko Hinkkanen, D.Sc. (Tech.), has been appointed Professor of electrical engineering with emphasis in power and energy at the Aalto University School of Electrical Engineering on 5 September 2016.
Iiro Jääskeläinen (born 1973, Finland) received his Ph.D. degree in psychology from University of Helsinki in 1995. In 2000 he started working at Harvard University in USA, initially as post-doctoral fellow and subsequently promoted to junior faculty. In 2003, he was
nominated to a fixed-term professorship at Helsinki University of Technology. He subsequently held senior scientist position at Aalto University until his nomination as tenured Associate Professor at the School of Science.
In his research, Jääskeläinen focuses on the use of movies as real-life like stimuli during neuroimaging to engage and measure of social cognition and emotions in the human brain. He is also contributing to teaching and curriculum development in the Life Science and Technology master’s degree program.
Professor Jääskeläinen has authored more than 120 scientific articles, including ones in PNAS, Nature Communications, Biological Psychiatry, and Trends in Neurosciences. He is an Associate Editor for Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.
Iiro Jääskeläinen, Ph.D., has been appointed Professor of systems neuroscience at the Aalto University School of Science on 24 January 2017.
Petri Kuoppamäki (born 1964, Finland) obtained his Doctor of Laws degree from Helsinki University in 2003. He is specialized on competition law.
Professor Kuoppamäki has authored many scientific books and articles on competition law, European law, law & economics, public procurement and regulation. His current research interests include mergers and acquisitions, private enforcement and application of competition rules in digital markets. In 2009 he was invited to the first ever chair in competition law in Finland at the University of Helsinki. Besides working in the academia, he has a made a significant career as a practicing lawyer.
From 1993 to 2001 he served as Secretary General of the Finnish Competition Council. Thereafter he was a partner in a leading law firm. From 2003 to 2011, he served as the global head of antitrust for Nokia Corporation (Vice President, Legal & IP).
Professor Kuoppamäki has fiduciary duties in many associations relating to science, legal profession and business. Among other things he is chairman of the editorial board of the Finnish Yearbook for Competition Law, member of the board of the Finnish Association for European Law, member the legal committee of Finnish Chamber of Commerce and member of the ICC global competition committee. He is editorial member of two leading journals on legal science. In 2016, as recognition of his scientific merits, he was appointed full member of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters.
Petri Kuoppamäki, LL.D, has been appointed Professor of business law, especially private law at the Aalto University School of Business on 22 May 2017.
Mikko Kurimo (born 1967, Finland) received his D.Sc. (Tech.) degree in computer science from Helsinki University of Technology in 1997. In his thesis, he developed neural networks based machine learning for automatic speech recognition (ASR). Since then, he has been working as a research scientist at IDIAP, a Swiss research centre for artificial intelligence, and as an international research fellow in a number of research groups specialized in machine learning and ASR, including University of Colorado in Boulder, University of Edinburgh, SRI in Stanford, ICSI in Berkeley, and NITech in Nagoya.
At Aalto University, Professor Kurimo has been the head of the automatic speech recognition group since his return from Switzerland in 2000. His has authored over 180 scientific articles and his work is internationally best-known for unsupervised sub-word language modeling for morphologically complex languages, such as Finnish, Estonian, Turkish and Arabic. His recent achievements include the winning of the 2017 multi-genre broadcast speech recognition challenge and success in Tekes Challenge Finland competition (348 competing projects) and in EC's H2020-ICT-2017 call (115 competing projects).
Mikko Kurimo, D.Sc. (Tech.), has been appointed Professor of speech and language processing at the Aalto University School of Electrical Engineering on 20 February 2017.
Marketta Kyttä (born 1961, Finland) received her Ph.D. in the Department of Architecture from Helsinki University of Technology in 2004. Her doctoral thesis about child-friendly environments received two awards, Lea Pulkkinen and Tapio Nummenmaa awards.
Having background in environmental psychology, her interests cover widely human aspects in planning. Her research topics include environments that promote wellbeing and health, perceived safety and new methods for public participation. Her innovation, “softGIS” methodology, enable the provision of people's place-based
knowledge in the GIS format, complementing the traditional GIS-data. Geospatial World Forum granted softGIS team a webGIS Innovation award in 2010. Currently, over 500 research and real life public participation projects around the world use softGIS methodology.
Professor Kyttä has authored more than 100 scientific articles with more than 2,600 citations. Kyttä has worked in several universities abroad, e.g. Milan Polytechnics, University of Queensland (Australia), and San Diego State University, USA.
Kyttä is a leader of a new Master’s programme, Spatial Planning and Transportation Engineering, that integrates the fields of land use and transportation planning without forgetting the human focus.
Marketta Kyttä, Ph.D., has been appointed Professor of land use planning at the Aalto University School of Engineering on 5 June 2017.
Professor Yongdan Li joined Aalto University in June 2017 as a full professor of Industrial Chemistry. After finishing his Ph.D. in Industrial Catalysis in the Department of Chemical Engineering at Tianjin University in 1989, he went to the University of Twente in the Netherlands and worked there as a post-doc for a year. He did a second post-doc at Ecole National Superior of Industrial Chemistry, Nancy, France. At the end of 1992, Dr. Li returned to Tianjin University, where he was promoted to a Full Professor at the beginning of 1994.
He had served as the Chairman of the Department of Catalysis Science and Technology and the Coordinator of the Industrial Catalysis Program since 1997 to 2017. This program was twice ranked as the top one in China, in 2001 and 2006. Dr. Li received the most prestigious award given to Chinese Young Scientists, “The NSF Award to Outstanding Young Scientist” in 2004, and obtained the most important title for professors in China “The Changjiang Chair Professorship” in 2007.
He now serves also as the Associate Editor of Catalysis Today and the Associate Editor of the CIESC Journal.
Yongdan Li, Ph.D., has been appointed Professor of industrial chemistry at the Aalto University School of Chemical Engineering on 19 December 2016.
Harri Lähdesmäki (born 1977, Finland) received M.Sc. and D.Sc. (Tech.) degrees from Tampere University of Technology in 2001 and 2005, respectively. During doctoral studies, he spent six months as a visiting scholar in the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX, USA (2002–2003). He was a postdoctoral researcher in the Institute for Systems Biology, Seattle, WA, USA (2005–2007) and senior assistant in Tampere University of Technology (2007–2009), after which he joined Aalto University as a pro term Professor and was nominated as an Assistant Professor in 2012.
Since joining Aalto in 2009, Dr. Lähdesmäki has been responsible for various B.Sc. and M.Sc. degree programmes, including Bioinformation Technology and Erasmus Mundus Programme in Systems Biology, and majors in Bioinformatics, and he has also organized education in collaboration with other Finnish and European universities.
Dr. Lähdesmäki’s research interests include computational biology, bioinformatics, probabilistic modeling, statistical data analysis and machine learning, and their interdisciplinary application in biology and personalized medicine. The overall goal of his research is to use computational techniques to model and understand molecular mechanisms and their role in health and disease. He has published approximately 100 peer-reviewed original publications.
Harri Lähdesmäki, D.Sc. (Tech.), has been appointed Professor of machine learning, probabilistic modeling, and data mining at the Aalto University School of Science on 20 April 2017.
Masood Masoodian (born 1967, Iran) received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Waikato, New Zealand, in 1997. He was an Assistant Professor in the University of Southern Denmark (1997–2000), before returning to the University of Waikato, where he had a tenured position for 17 years, and was involved in developing and coordinating several university degree programmes in visual communication design, interactive media, and interaction design.
Professor Masoodian has a broad range of research interests related to the role of visual communication design and visual design thinking in areas such as sustainability and health. He is also particularly interested in design and evaluation of temporal visualizations that support ordinary people, without expertise in data visualization or visual analytics, in understanding and interpreting their own personal data.
Professor Masoodian has served as the programme chair and committee member for numerous international conferences and workshops, as well as being a reviewer for several academic journals. He has close collaboration with many international researchers, and has co-authored over 140 peer-reviewed publications.
Masood Masoodian, Ph.D., has been appointed Professor of visual communication design at the Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture on 25 April 2016.
Robin Ras (born 1976, Belgium) received his Ph.D. degree in Bioscience Engineering – Chemistry at the University of Leuven, Belgium in 2003. He was a postdoctoral researcher (2004–2006) and lecturing researcher (2006–2011) at Helsinki University of Technology and Aalto University. In 2011, he received Academy Research Fellowship from Academy of Finland, and was appointed in 2013 as Assistant Professor Experimental Condensed Matter Physics at the Department of Applied Physics. In 2017, Professor Ras received a Double Aalto Affiliation with School of Chemical Engineering, Department of Bioproducts and Biosystems.
The research of Robin Ras is situated at the interface between physics, chemistry and materials science, dealing with fundamental scientific problems and technological applications. In 2016, he received the ERC Consolidator grant for research on extremely water-repellent surfaces. He has authored nearly 100 scientific publications, including several in the prestigious journals Science and Nature Communications.
Professor Ras initiated and coordinates efforts to establish a double doctoral degree program between Aalto University and the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT). He is the local coordinator of EIT Raw Materials International Master’s Program in Advanced Materials for Innovation and Sustainability.
Robin Ras, Ph.D., has been appointed Professor of experimental condensed matter physics at the Aalto University School of Science on 28 August 2017.
Zhipei Sun (born 1978, China) earned his Ph.D. degree in Optical Physics from the Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2005. Prior to joining Aalto, Zhipei Sun was a Research Fellow at the Institute of Photonics Sciences (ICFO, Spain) and a Senior Research Associate at the Department of Engineering at the Cambridge University (UK).
His research interests include lasers, nonlinear optics, ultrafast photonics, and nanophotonics. In particular, he focuses on carbon nanotubes, two-dimensional layered materials, and bio-materials for photonics and optoelectronics.
Professor Sun has authored and co-authored more than 160 journal articles, conference proceedings, and book chapters.
Zhipei Sun, Ph.D., has been appointed Professor of photonics at the Aalto University School of Electrical Engineering on 20 February 2017.
Zhi Zong (born 1964, China) received his Ph.D. degree in Shipbuilding Engineering at Hiroshima University, Japan, in 1995. He joined the Institute of High Performance Computing (Singapore) as a Senior Research Engineer in 1996 and a Principle Research Engineer in 1999. He acted as an assistant manager in 2003. He joined Dalian University of Technology, China, as a full professor in 2004. He acted as deputy department head (2004–2008) and Head for the School of Shipbuilding Engineering (2013–2016).
Professor Zong’s research interests include marine hydrodynamics, high-performance ships, underwater explosion, and ocean engineering. The Development Way designed by him was the world-first Semi-Submersible Heavy-Lifting Ship conversed from a LPG ship. He has received ISOPE Best Paper award, Singapore National Defense Technology Award and three Chinese MOE awards.
Professor Zong initiated international seminar on Green’s Function. He has served as a member of Editorial Board for several journals. He has authored or co-authored six monographs, over 260 publications with 110 indexed by SCI-E.
Zhi Zong, Ph.D., has been appointed Professor of hydrodynamics at the Aalto University School of Engineering on 29 October 2015.
More information
Producer Minna Pajari
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Aalto University, Communication services