Chem Awards 2022 are chosen

Teaching Act – Juha Siitonen 

Juha Siitonen, Assistant Professor in Organic Chemistry, receives outstanding course feedback from students and therefore he contributes highly to the first-year experience of students.  

His fresh and novel approaches to teaching combined with deep knowledge make chemistry understandable for his students. Juha also actively participates in EDI (Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion) topics. 

Teaching Excellence is awarded in recognition of actions that positively impact students' learning, well-being, satisfaction, and academic achievement, and for developing engaging curricula. 

Service Act – Heidi Flinkman 

The Service Act of the Year is awarded for promoting school success through, for example, effective practices, proactive and equitable information sharing, or promoting inclusion and well-being. 

Heidi Flinkman helps students proactively and comprehensively. ​She is interested in students’ wellbeing and progress during their exchange period. She ensures arriving international students feel welcome and all arrangements are made properly. Heidi helps CHEM students in every step of their exchange studies. ​She also cooperates with exchange partner institutions abroad and develops the partner network​.  

As secretary of the Academic Committee for Chemical Engineering Heidi enables quality decision making. ​ 

Impact Act – Teaching Competence Assessment Committee​ (TCAC) 

The Impact Act is awarded in recognition and encouragement for promoting visibility and impact through networking.  

This year’s award is based on impacting the development and quality of our school​. TCAC’s work has a wide-ranging impact, internally and externally.​ As a member of the teaching competence assessment committee, you improve the quality of our teaching. This is done by ensuring​ our teachers develop their teaching​, we recruit the best possible professors, lecturers, and teachers,​ and therefore our students receive better education.​ 

2021-2022 there has been a record number of evaluations in our school where the teaching competence of our lecturers, professors, and people in the recruitment process has been assessed.  

Members of TCAC: 

Professor Marjatta Louhi-Kultanen (chair) ​ 

Senior University Lecturer Jari Aromaa ​ 

University Lecturer Ville Jokinen 

Senior University Lecturer Reetta Karinen ​ 

Professor Eero Kontturi ​ 

Professor Mauri Kostiainen (Professor Mady Elbahri)​ 

Professor Rodrigo Serna​ 

Professor Ali Tehrani​ 

University Lecturer Minna-Hanna Nieminen​ 

Specialist Jukka Välimäki, LES​ 

Students Melissa Hendren, Ilmari Hieta​ 

Secretary Liisa Wang​ 

Research Act – Eduardo Anaya-Plaza and Sandra Kaabel​ 

The Research of the Year Award recognises research of exceptional quality and impact. 

The research act of the year is awarded to Eduardo Anaya-Plaza and Dr. Sandra Kaabel based on their successful transition from a senior postdoc to junior PI (Marie Curie PD, Academy of Finland Research Fellow).​ 

The researchers have carried out excellent collaboration and a shared paper: A Greener Route to Blue: Solid-State Synthesis of Phthalocyanines in Angewandte Chemie - International Edition. 61, 42, 7 p., e202209033.​ 

The excellence and impact of the paper has been immediately recognized by the community: the paper is in the top 5% of all research outputs scored by Altmetric and the paper was selected as a cover picture. ​The researchers have been invited to prepare a review to ChemPlusChem, and a highlight in Synthetic Letters​. Eduardo was also invited to submit Young Researcher profile in Angewandte Chemie International Edition (doi.org/10.1002/anie.202211750​. 

Both have also actively contributed to the department level activities and course teaching, not to mention the extensive supervision tasks and building up international collaboration networks (e.g. with Technical University of München and University of Barcelona). Eduardo’s and Sandra’s cooperation is a true example of bottom-up research that stems from coffee room discussions, where a group of people with diverse backgrounds get together, discuss science, form a group, execute the work, and finally get exciting results.