Professor Mikael Rinne: Fracture mechanics in rock engineering

Mikael Rinne

Mikael Rinne was appointed as associate professor with tenure in the Department of Civil Engineering on 1 June 2019. The field of his professorship is rock mechanics. He has held fixed term professor positions at Helsinki University of Technology and Aalto University since 2008.  

Before his academic career, Rinne worked two decades in consulting companies in Finland and Sweden. His consulting assignments mostly dealt with tunneling projects and research in geological disposal of spent nuclear fuel. His postgraduate studies focused on modelling rock fracture propagation close to the deposition holes of nuclear waste. His current research interest deals with rock fracture mechanics and its applications in rock engineering and mining.  

He has supervised or co-supervised more than one hundred Master’s theses and five doctoral theses from start to end. He has published over 30 peer-reviewed journal articles and 40 conference papers. He is the co-author and co-editor of the first and second editions of the famous book “Modelling Rock Fracturing Processes”. 

He is the director of the Master’s programme EMMEP-European Mining Course at Aalto University. 

Rinne completed his Licentiate (Tech.) studies at KTH Stockholm Sweden in 2001 and received his Doctor of Science (Tech.) degree in rock engineering from Helsinki University of Technology (TKK) in 2008.