Academy Professors at the Ģ��ֱ��

Academy Professors at the Ģ��ֱ��

Professorships are internationally leading-edge researchers and recognised experts in their field. They are expected to have great scientific impact in the scientific community and in society at large.

Academy professorships 1.9.2021–31.8.2026

Academy Professor Pasi Ihalainen

Pasi Ihalainen explores political representation, analysing tensions between parliament and the people from the age of revolutions to the 21st century.

Using the concepts of representation and popular sovereignty, Ihalainen will investigate historical and present-day constructions, deconstructions and reconstructions of parliamentary legitimacy in political discourse. He will search and analyse digitised parliamentary records from Finland and a number of other European countries.

Research Council of Finland:

Pasi Ihalainen explores political representation, analysing tensions between parliament and the people from the age of revolutions to the 21st century. Using the concepts of representation and popular sovereignty, Ihalainen will investigate historical and present-day constructions, deconstructions and reconstructions of parliamentary legitimacy in political discourse. He will search and analyse digitised parliamentary records from Finland and a number of other European countries.

Pasi Ihalainen

Academy Professor Otso Ovaskainen

Otso Ovaskainen started as a professor of mathematical and statistical ecology at the Ģ��ֱ�� on January 2021. He moveed to Jyväskylä from his position as a professor of mathematical ecology at the University of Helsinki, where he worked since 2009.

Ovaskainen is a world-class expert in mathematical and statistical modelling. He has developed new methods for empirical data collection and statistical analysis in ecological research. The methods have been used all over the world.

Currently, Otso Ovaskainen is leading an internationally unique study in which the diversity of nature is mapped at the same time in over 450 locations all over the world. Data on species are collected through DNA and audio samples and camera trap photos utilising automation-based methods. In 2019, the research received 12 million euros of ERC funding.

Research Council of Finland:

Otso Ovaskainen will conduct research to generate new information about global biodiversity. Ovaskainen will focus on its current distribution, the drivers of its dynamics, and how it can be expected to change due to ongoing global changes. One of the aims of the project is to generate unprecedented global data on biodiversity, especially for fungi and arthropods, which comprise a major part of biodiversity but for which systematic globally relevant data are currently lacking.

Otso Ovaskainen

Previous Academy Professorhips at the Ģ��ֱ��

Academy Professor Sara Heinämaa

Sara Heinämaa (Academy Professor 2017–2021)

is working to develop a philosophical approach to studying social marginalisation and exclusion. Her thinking is grounded in the idea that experiences of normality and abnormality have a decisive role in all social processes in which individual and community differences become polarised and in which these differences and antagonisms are resolved through marginalisation and exclusion.

Heinämaa’s creative and interdisciplinary approach opens up a new research perspective on normality and abnormality. She is one of Europe’s leading scholars of corporeal phenomenology, and she has authored award-winning publication.

Sara Heinämaa

Academy Professor Johanna Mappes

Johanna Mappes (Academy Professor 2018-2021) explores interspecies interactions, particularly the evolution of warning signals and mimicry among prey with chemical defences but also the evolution of sexual and asexual reproduction, and bacterial virulence. From the simplest cells to the complex societies of bees or humans, life thrives on communication.

Mappes is an esteemed evolutionary ecologist who works at the Department of Biological and Environmental Science of the Ģ��ֱ��. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the oldest learned societies in the world, invited Mappes as a Foreign Honorary Member on 18 April 2018. Mappes also served as Academy Professor in 2009–2013. She headed the Centre of Excellence in Biological Interactions Research in 2012–2017.

Academy Professor Hannu Häkkinen

Hannu Häkkinen (Academy Professor 2016-2020) applies theoretical and computational methods to the study of the physical, chemical and bioconjugate properties of nanostructured metal-molecule interfaces. The research focuses especially on metal nanoparticles and nanostructures protected by organic ligand molecules and on new breakthroughs in their use as catalysts, sensors, components for molecular electronics, biocompatible labels and drug carriers.

Professor Häkkinen is based at the Ģ��ֱ�� (Department of Physics and Department of Chemistry) and at the Nanoscience Center (NSC), working in close collaboration with NSC teams and a number of foreign teams. Häkkinen is a highly acclaimed scientist in his field with an extensive and top-level network of international collaborators. For example, he has worked with Nobel laureate Roger D Kornberg from Stanford University and with Hans-Joachim Freund, director of the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society.