Väisälä Award to Mika Sillanpää

The Finnish Academy of Science and Letters has granted a Väisälä award to Professor Mika Sillanpää.

The Väisälä Foundations awards have been granted since 2000 and are given to 1-3 active researchers.

Sillanpää defended his dissertation in 2005 from Helsinki Universoty of Technology. After this he worked as a post doc in the USA and as an academy researcher in Finland. Sillanpää’s work has been published in Nature, Science and Physical Reviews Letters. Sillanpää was appointed professor in physics at Aalto University in 2012.

At Aalto University Mika Sillanpää leads the Quantum Nanomechanics group which focuses on studies of micro- and nanomechanical resonators near the quantum ground state of moving objects. He is also a teamleader in the Low Temperature Quantum Phenomena and Devices Center of Excellence.

Sillanpää tells The Finnish Academy of Science and Letters that he has always been interested in nature.

- It is a great joy to see how this beautiful machinery works and to understand its functions and logic. This is the reason I decided to be an experimental physicist. I have dreamed of this life I now live.