New research environments on the roadmap

The Research Council of Finland has selected 21 cutting-edge research environments to Finland’s national roadmap for research infrastructures 2025-2028. The roadmap is a list of strategically important research infrastructure services for Finnish research, education and innovation activities. The ones selected to the roadmap will be granted funding by the Research Council.

For Aalto University, the roadmap now includes six new research environments in which the university is involved:

The Aalto Ice and Wave Tank is the world's largest ice-basin that can produce both ice and waves in model scale. In Arctic research, experiments are needed to study the physical phenomena related to ice, waves, ships and structures such as wind turbines. This research will help reduce the risks associated with operating in ice-covered seas.

Magics is an infrastructure for human in the digital world as well as a community for practicing cutting-edge science and art related to socially sustainable digitalisation and virtualisation. Magics stands out as the only infrastructure in Finland, and few in the world truly bridging art and science to spur new research and innovations.

Synthetic biology and biomanufacturing research BioFoundry operates at the interface of science and industry. The research environment develops solutions for industrial biotechnology. In addition to knowledge generation, education and research, it supports the development of the future circular bioeconomy and national manufacturing resiliency. 

The Cosmology Data Centre of Finland will enable Finland to participate in major international observational cosmology projects in the study of the universe, such as the European Space Agency's Euclid and Lisa observatories. The Euclid space telescope is helping to solve the mystery of the accelerating expansion of the universe, while Lisa, the first gravitational wave observatory in space, sees further than has been possible with optical or radio telescopes.

Many of the roadmap's research infrastructures also offer a range of key technologies, data sets, computing and other services. For example, register-based research will be strengthened with the new remote access, application service and training infrastructure (Fire). The infrastructure will be built on the foundation of the remote access system of Statistics Finland and it will provide a technically and usably state-of-the-art computing environment and a registry data catalogue.

Through the Open Geospatial Information Infrastructure for Research (Geoportti) researchers can easily access geospatial data and geocomputing resources through a centralised high-performance computing and cloud infrastructure. The infrastructure has become an integral key service platform and already has thousands of users.

The most impactful spearheads selected as ‘lighthouses’ – Aalto involved in several 

Six of the research environments on the roadmap have been selected by the Research Council as 'lighthouses', i.e. infrastructures that have shown particular pioneership and impact. Aalto University is involved in four of them: OtaNano for quantum technology, nanoelectronics, micro and nanophotonics and new materials; Euro-BioImaging, one of Finland's leading centres for biological and biomedical imaging, with Aalto Neuroimaging as part of it; Fuwiri, a testbed for future wireless networks and the Fin-Clariah infrastructure serving research in human sciences through, for example, large language models and artificial intelligence.

The Academy has earmarked a total of 127 million euros in funding to support all the research infrastructures on the roadmap over the period 2025–2029.

More information on the Research Council of Finland website