Research Council of Finland Centres of Excellence

The Antimicrobial Resistance pandemic is considered a major global crisis because it threatens human health, not only in the form of non-treatable infections but also by complicating modern medicine as we know it: Without protective antibiotics, it would be impossible to carry out procedures such as intensive cancer treatment, organ transplantation and prosthetic joint surgery.

The Multidisciplinary Centre of Excellence in Antimicrobial Resistance Research takes a comprehensive approach to understanding determinants of antimicrobial resistance across scales from a One Health perspective that incorporates humans, animals and the environment. The researchers from different scientific disciplines will work in close collaboration in order to achieve the interdisciplinary scientific goals.

The director of the Multidisciplinary Center of Excellence in Antimicrobial Resistance Research is Marko Virta.  The centre comprises research groups operating at the University of Helsinki and University of Turku

The Centre of Excellence in Music, Mind, Body and Brain studies how the cognitive, emotional, embodied, and interactional experience of music develops, and how music functions as a powerful engine of change throughout the life span.

Music is a source of pleasure, aesthetic enjoyment, and recreation that also engages the brain extensively, and that can enhance learning, social interaction, and mental wellbeing. However, the individual, contextual, psychological, and neural mechanisms underpinning the efficacy of music are not yet well known.

The Centre of Excellence in Music, Mind, Body and Brain will provide new knowledge on the multimodal experience and mechanisms of music from childhood to old age as well as in different developmental, psychiatric, and neurological disorders across life stages. The centre will also develop new music-based methods that can support learning and improve emotional, cognitive, motor, and social wellbeing in both daily life and educational and rehabilitation settings.

The director of the Centre of Excellence in Music, Mind, Body and Brain is . The centre comprises research groups at the and at the Faculty of Medicine and Faculty of Education of the University of Helsinki led by and .

Many problems in mathematics and its multifarious applications lead to strikingly similar -  universal - questions pertaining to random structures. The geometry of random structures is often fractal. Such structures occur particularly in statistical and quantum field theory, with magnetisation and quantum gravity as examples. Random structures naturally emerge  in the derivation of macroscopic laws of nature  from microscopic ones.

The Centre of Excellence in Randomness and Structures investigates such phenomena. The Centre’s  specific goal is to understand the analytical and geometric characteristics of random structures. As this research requires expertise in a number of mathematical fields, the Centre of Excellence will bring together a new generation of leading mathematicians to solve these problems.

Random structures also make an unexpected appearance in number theory, including the structure of the sequence of prime numbers. As the noted mathematician Paul Erdős stated: "God may not play dice with the universe, but something strange is going on with the prime numbers." Among other things, the Centre of Excellence explores the random nature of multiplicative functions and the Riemann zeta function.

The Centre of Excellence also conducts research aimed directly at producing applications by  developing high-dimensional statistics as well as randomised algorithms and their geometric understanding for the purposes of computational applications and machine learning.

Among other things, knowledge pertaining to random structures is used to model the flow of water in rock, with geothermal energy production as the application target. Another target for application is the predictability of the condensation models of atmospheric aerosols and, consequently, models used in predicting climate change.  

The Centre of Excellence in Randomness and Structures is headed by Professor Eero Saksman. In addition to the University of Helsinki, the research groups comprising the Centre of Excellence are active at , and .

The Centre of Excellence in Tax Systems Research investigates how taxation and regulation affect individuals, business operations and, more broadly, society, and how individuals and businesses make financial decisions.

The goal is to produce reliable knowledge in support of designing the tax and income transfer system. The research challenges previous notions on the effects of taxation on the behaviour of businesses and private taxpayers, potentially having a fundamental impact on social and public policy recommendations pertaining to a sound tax system.

The Centre of Excellence utilises extensive registry datasets, survey data and randomised experiments.

The unit is led by Professor i from . Also active in the Centre of Excellence are the and the University of Helsinki. Research is also carried out collaboratively with other Finnish institutions involved in high-quality economic tax research and top international scholars in the field.

The Centre of Excellence in Tree Biology investigates how trees take up and use carbon dioxide.

Trees bind carbon dioxide in the atmosphere through their stomata and use photosynthesised carbon for growth and development. Through their conductive tissue, trees transport the molecules produced by photosynthesis to various tissues responsible for tree growth.

The Centre of Excellence’s research will produce new knowledge needed for sustainable environmental policy.

Some individual trees are more effective as carbon sinks than others. Consequently, the findings of the Centre of Excellence on the genetic basis of the carbon sink effect can be applied also to forest tree breeding.

The Centre of Excellence in Tree Biology is headed by Yrjö Helariutta and comprises research groups based at the University of Helsinki.

The Virtual Laboratory for Molecular-Level Atmospheric Transformations, an Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence, investigates how aerosols form from gaseous compounds in the atmosphere.

The formation of atmospheric aerosols is integrally linked to two major challenges facing humanity: climate change and air quality. Namely, aerosols help cool the climate, but they also increase mortality through poor air quality.

A key problem in predicting aerosol formation is that the phenomenon is affected by an enormous number of compounds and extremely complex processes. The Centre of Excellence aims to establish an interactive virtual laboratory that will combine methods of atmospheric physics, chemistry and computer science.

The centre will produce new knowledge that can be used in climate-related decision-making and the development of technical solutions to improve air quality. The utilisation of artificial intelligence provides the opportunity to solve many unsolved problems in the atmospheric sciences, including the reactions responsible for the formation and growth of organic aerosols.

Versions of solutions to be developed by the virtual laboratory tailored for science communication also offer schoolchildren and the general public the chance to gain insights concerning not only the atmospheric sciences, but also the scientific method in general.

The Centre of Excellence: Virtual Laboratory for Molecular-Level Atmospheric Transformations is headed by Hanna Vehkamäki. The research groups comprising the Centre of Excellence are based at the University of Helsinki, , and .