Biodesign Finland wins the Aalto Pioneering Excellence Award 2025

The annually awarded Aalto Pioneering Excellence Award is intended for teams that develop Aalto University's top research, the impact of education and societal impact. The aim of the award is to inspire members of the Aalto community to create a culture committed to improving performance, while being flexible, adaptable and capable of evolving for the future.

The Aalto Pioneering Excellence Award will be awarded in 2025 to the Biodesign Finland team. The team has done excellent work in developing cross-disciplinary expertise and another culture that fosters and mentors excellent success within Aalto University's collaborative network. Biodesign Finland is a need-based health technology education and innovation programme that aims to provide the best foundation for the creation of new health technology companies. In addition to innovation initiatives aimed at new startups, the team has developed a common needs platform where the needs identified in the programme can be utilised in, for example, student projects. Besides commercialisable innovations, service innovations are also created from Biodesign for the use of healthcare units participating in the programme.

The impact of Biodesign Finland's work extends beyond Aalto to the Helsinki metropolitan area's innovation ecosystem, and the programme has also been piloted in Northern Ostrobothnia in cooperation with Pohto, the University of Oulu and Business Oulu. In the future, the goal is for the programme to operate in universities and wellbeing areas affiliated with university hospitals throughout Finland. Not all of the programme's impact has yet been realised; there is still a lot of potential remaining.

’This recognition award is very significant. We've been working on this since 2016. We want to thank everyone who has made the programme possible. We particularly want to highlight the innovation researchers, who develop need-based innovations in the programme with an entrepreneurial attitude together with clinicians and researchers from higher education institutions. We participants in this award ceremony are facilitators who enable the activities of the innovation researchers. Alongside the health technology startups, we develop hospital operations through service innovations. Additionally, we bring needs from the hospital onto the needs platform for students to use as thesis topics and projects, such as in Aalto's PdP course,’ the team members say.

The operational team of Biodesign Finland includes the director of the Biodesign Finland programme Heikki Nieminen (Aalto), programme manager Salla Keränen (Aalto), impact coordinator Otto Olavinen, former Biodesign Finland coordinator Jaakko Nieminen, former teacher in the Biodesign Finland programme Håkan Mitts (Aalto), Anne Patana (Neurobiodesign) and active mentor Sakari Soini.

Biodesign Finland pioneers include Risto Ilmoniemi (Aalto), Markku Mäkijärvi (HUS), and Risto Renkonen (University of Helsinki). The current executive team comprises Matti Hämäläinen (Aalto), Pekka Kahri (HUS) and Taneli Raivio (HUS).

Biodesign Finland is a strategic initiative of Aalto University School of Science, HUS and the University of Helsinki's Faculty of Medicine, developed in collaboration with Metropolia University of Applied Sciences and the City of Helsinki, and hosted by the Department of Neuroscience and Biomedical Engineering (NBE) at Aalto University.

Honourable mention for developers and implementers of programming education at the Department of Computer Science

The Aalto Pioneering Excellence Honourable Mention will be awarded in 2025 to the developers and implementers of programming education at the Department of Computer Science at the School of Science. In addition to development of the online teaching platform and online teaching pedagogy, the team has produced programming content and software to support learning and teaching, which are used by other universities in Finland, such as the University of Tampere. Additionally, the group has produced online programming courses for the use of networks like FITech and developed practices for students outside Aalto to complete Aalto courses with temporary study rights. The group has also conducted research on the development of online programming education, which has already resulted in over 20 doctoral theses and hundreds of scientific articles.

’The demand for highly educated programmers is not just technical. When AI generates code for us, a growing gap emerges between what our systems do and what we understand them to do. Learning to program is about embracing structures of thought – algorithmic reasoning, managing layers of abstraction, evaluating trade-offs. These grow only through a slow process of encountering problems, solving them and understanding why a particular solution works. Current language models act as a statistical mirror: they reflect existing coding practices, reinforcing prevailing paradigms, but rarely challenging them. This leads to two risks: the deterioration of problem-solving skills and the stagnation of innovation – if new code is based on old, where will paradigm shifts come from? We need to educate programmers who do not just use tools but understand their limits – and can build what the tools cannot,’ says university lecturer Arto Hellas from the team receiving the honourable mention.

The members of the group are Professor Lauri Malmi, Senior University Lecturer Juha Sorva, Senior University Lecturer Ari Korhonen, Senior University Lecturer Arto Hellas, Senior University Lecturer Kerttu Pollari-Malmi, University Lecturer Otto Seppälä, Senior University Lecturer Tommi Junttila, University Lecturer Lukas Ahrenberg, University Lecturer Sanna Suoranta, University Lecturer Barbara Keller, Assistant Professor Juho Leinonen, Professor Jukka Suomela, Professor Petri Vuorimaa and Researcher Anni Rytkönen. 

Besides the aforementioned individuals, other people have participated in activities over the years as doctoral researchers and software developers. The IT team at the CS department provides essential support for system maintenance and development.

The award is made possible by the fund established by honorary industrial counsellor Matti Sundberg, which focuses on supporting top-quality expertise at Aalto University. The award ceremony was held on 26 November at the School of Business. The awards were evaluated and presented by the evaluation committee. The committee includes the Chairman of Orion's board, Veli-Matti Mattila, as well as Professors Tua Björklund, Tuuli Mattelmäki and Risto Rajala from Aalto University.

What is the Aalto Pioneering Excellence Award?