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The Academy of Finland has granted Aalto University 15.4 million euros for strengthening its research profile over the next six years. This form of funding supports universities in strengthening the research fields they have chosen.

Aalto University’s funding application is strongly linked to the university’s new strategy, shaping a sustainable future by developing solutions to global grand challenges. Aalto’s strength in this work is its unique profile of science, art, design, technology and business.

Funding was sought for four themes, which are built around the key areas of Aalto's core competence while also being distinctively multidisciplinary and mutually supportive:

• 'AI-driven healthcare' advances the potential of artificial intelligence in personalized medicine and decision making for socially and economically sustainable healthcare.
• 'Computational imagination' develops creative technologies at the intersection of technology and art, facilitating wellbeing and sustainability through interactive capabilities.
• 'Co-innovating circular systems' focuses on systemic circular economy solutions related to the use of key Finnish natural resources: metals, forests, and water.
• 'Leading for creativity' addresses leadership of creative processes and outcomes necessary for breaking unsustainable path-dependencies.

‘We applied for funding in areas where we already have strong activities and in emerging areas where Aalto University can produce new and revolutionary expertise,’ says Ossi Naukkarinen, Vice President of Research. ‘We selected these themes because they are fields where we have strong basic competence in our key research areas and because they provide the opportunity for building new multidisciplinary cooperation. The themes continue the development we launched with previous profiling funding.’

Aalto University will use the funding to promote its new strategy by attracting top international talent through professor recruitments and by building new collaboration across our fields with joint postdocs and doctoral students. Aalto will also strengthen ecosystem cooperation by hiring postdocs and doctoral students to cooperate with companies or other partners.

This was the Academy of Finland’s sixth round of profiling funding, and it totalled 100 million euros. This is double the amount of the 2019 call, because from now on the call will only be opened every second year. The Academy made its funding decisions based on reviews performed by an international panel of experts. Aalto University received 13.6 million euros in the first call in 2015, 12 million in 2016, 10.8 million in 2017, 11.7 million in 2018, and 10.4 million in 2019.

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Photo: Structural Colours, Noora Yau & Konrad Klockars. Photographer: Valeria Azovskaya