Research

Research Council of Finland awards funding for 13 new Academy Research Fellows and Academy Projects in natural sciences and engineering

Published on 10.6.2026

Tampere University

The Research Council of Finland’s Scientific Council for Natural Sciences and Engineering has awarded grants to four new Academy Research Fellowships and nine Academy Projects at Tampere University. Researchers at Tampere University received a total of nearly €7 million in research funding.

The Research Council of Finland’s Scientific Council for Natural Sciences and Engineering selected 61 researchers to receive an Academy Research Fellowship and 76 projects to get Academy Project Funding. The new Academy Projects are composed of 103 subprojects. The total funding is around €41 million for Academy Research Fellowships and around €53 million for Academy Projects. The funding period in the Academy Research Fellowship and Academy Project funding schemes is four years.

In this round, the applicant success rate was about 14% in both Academy Research Fellowships and Academy Projects.

New Academy Research Fellows at Tampere University

Ali Eftekhari: Hydrogel Crosslinking for 3D Bioscaffold and Drug-Eluting Implant Fabrication Using Low-Intensity Red/Near-Infrared Light (HiLight), 699 434 €. See the funding decision for details on Ali Eftekhari’s research.

Jie Jiang: Morphogenetic Interfaces using Self-Growth Liquid Crystal Elastomers, 695 112 €. See the funding decision for details on Jie Jiang’s research.

Xinxin Yu: RAILCLIMA: Climate-Aware Wheel–Rail Condition Monitoring Through Computer Vision and Model-Based Friction Estimation, 699 391 €. Seet the funding decision for details on XinXin Yu’s research.

Robin Rajamäki: Array Geometry Evolved: Harnessing Resource-Efficiency in Future MIMO Sensing and Communications Systems, 699 472 €. See the funding decision for details on Robin Rajamäki’s research.

New Academy Projects at Tampere University

Tim Länsivaara: AI-supported advanced imaging for Geo, €287,695 (leader in the project consortium). See the funding decision for details on Tim Länsivaara’s research.

Turkka Salminen: AI-supported advanced imaging for Geo, €207,393 (partner in the project consortium). See the funding decision for details on Turkka Salminen’s research.

Robert Bregovic: AI-supported advanced imaging for Geo, €210,302 (partner in project the consortium). See the funding decision for details on Robert Bregovic’s research.

Hamed Badihi: Scalable and Resilient Federated Learning for Fleet-Wide Condition Monitoring of Wind Farms (FleetCM4Wind), €582,026. See the funding decision for details on Hamed Badihi’s research.

Ertugrul Basar: NOISY: Toward Noise-Driven Communication for Secure, Energy-Efficient, and Low-Complexity Wireless Networks, €599,983. See the funding decision for details on Ertugrul Basar’s research.

Atanas Gotchev: Energy-Efficient Wide Field-of-View Light Field Imaging (E-WIDE-LIGHT), €599,974. See the funding decision for details on Atanas Gotchev’s research.

Ville Santala: Modular Bioengineered Matrices for Selective Recovery of Rare Earth Elements from Complex Waste Streams, €500,000 (leader in project consortium). See the funding decision for details on Ville Santala’s research.

Paola Vivo: Perovskite-Inspired Materials: The ROAD Ahead (ROAD), €598,323. See the funding decision for details on Paola Vivo’s research.

Hao Zeng: Light- and heat-fuelled ciliary motors for propulsion, coupling, energy harvesting and endoscopy applications (Cilia), €594,718. See the funding decision for details on Hao Zeng’s research.