PI
Maria Sammalkorpi, D.Sc. (Tech.)
Maria claims to be nice, and occasionally is. She used to be quite shy about her geeky books and computers. Then, she went to get a degree in physics and grew up a little. The amount she grew is rather disputable as she still measures only 153cm (~5ft). Sometime later she acknowledged also chemistry, got a doctoral degree, and fell in love, definitely not in that order.
Post-docs
Sousa Javan Nikkhah, Ph.D.
Sousa models polymer assemblies towards understanding the role of solvent, polymer composition and solvation conditions on the assembly characteristics. She works on large scale materials properties using atomistic, coarse-grained and mesoscale polymer models. Sousa's background is in polymer technology and besides modelling techniques, she is very familiar with physical characterization of polymer materials.
Mohammad Khavani Sariani, Ph.D.
Mohammad works on cosolvent effects on hydrated polyelectrolyte materials in water solutions. He comes to the group with a physical chemistry background (both computational and experimental). In the group, he focuses on atomistic detail and quantum chemical modelling.
Graduate students
Jukka Määttä, M.Sc.
Jukka did as his M.Sc. thesis work a force-field parametrization for phosphatidylglycerols also in the Applied Physics Department of Aalto University. In physical chemistry, he continues to work on modelling of lipids but now also interfaces.
Sampsa Vierros, M.Sc.
Sampsa is doing his doctoral thesis on surfactant aggregates in apolar solutions. He has also studied aqueous micellar systems and surfactant interfaces, as well as, carbon nanotube - surfactant interactions. His work is mainly computational but he does also experiments in the group. Sampsa graduated with M.Sc. from the Chemistry department of Aalto University and did also his M.Sc. thesis in the group (on reverse lecithin micelles).
Maisa Vuorte, M.Sc.
Maisa works on characterizing surfactant adsorption from apolar solvents to solid substrates computationally in the group. She has also worked on polymeric micelles and dielectric membranes. Maisa comes to us with a bioinformation technology and Life Science Technologies Aalto M.Sc. program, augmented with some molecular biosciences studies, background.
Zhennan Kou, M.Sc.
Zhennan models the interactions of cellulose crystals in water solutions focusing especially on the effects of cosolutes. Before joining the group, Zhennan did his M.Sc. thesis in the Applied Physics Department of Aalto University focusing on modelling phonons in MoS2 lattices.
Master's thesis students
Tia Korhonen
Tia is completing her M.Sc. thesis on cellulose crystal surface - ion interactions.
Undergraduate students (research assistants)
Aapo Lokka
Markus Kyllönen
Rosa-Maria Penttinen
Group alumni:
Dr. Sathish Kumar Mudedla, Dr. Piotr Batys, Dr. Ran Zhang, Dr. Erol Yildirm, Dr. Hanne Antila, L.Sc. Dipti Potdar, M.Sc. Zahra Mohammadyarloo, M.Sc. Samu Kivistö, M.Sc. Anna Leino, M.Sc. Dominik Wowczyk, Juliaana Juurakko, Iina Kivimäki, Laura Tiittanen, Marc Härkönen, Sami Kulju, Sohvi Luukkonen
