09 Postdoctoral Fellowship at Aalto University, Finland

We are seeking a Postdoctoral Researcher (100%) fixed-term position to join our academic operations until June 2026, starting from January 2025 or as soon as possible. In this role, you will join a multidisciplinary research project with Finnish industry, examining idea acceptance and advancement in the context of developing sustainable energy solutions. Like all academic positions at the Design Factory, the role also includes joining the teaching team of select master’s level courses in development, as well as advising bachelor and master’s level students.

We are looking for a postdoctoral researcher to work with us on the design and 3D printing of bio-inspired hydrogels, involving designing 3D functional geometries, optimizing hydrogel compositions, and printing 3D functional geometries. The goal is to develop hydrogels with functions mimicking natural systems.

The Robot Learning research group is seeking a talented Postdoc with strong interest in Reinforcement Learning and Mobile Manipulation.

The Aalto Robot Learning research group operates in the intersection of artificial intelligence and robotics. We focus on developing methods for reinforcement learning, robotic manipulation, decision making under partial observability, imitation learning, and decision making in multi-agent systems. The goal of the research group is to help robots understand what they need to learn to perform their assigned tasks, and, thus, make robots capable of operating on their own and pro-actively help humans. To accomplish these goals the research group develops novel decision-making methods and uses these methods to solve unsolved robotic tasks. For more information, please see https://rl.aalto.fi.

The main task of the Postdoc will be to develop new reinforcement learning and planning methods. The developed methods may be based on one of our focus areas improving efficiency and generalization in control of complex systems. A goal is to develop methods that can be used for robotic mobile manipulation in unstructured partly unknown environments and in environments with elastic or deformable objects. The developed methods are evaluated with real robots such as our Boston Dynamics Spot robot. The exact direction of the research is chosen depending on your experience and interests. Please relate clearly to the research topics in your Letter of Motivation.

Outstanding researchers from the areas of Machine Learning, AI, Robotics, and related areas including Reinforcement Learning, Control Engineering, Computer Vision, Statistics & Optimization, or Mathematics & Physics are welcome to apply. The candidate is expected to conduct independent research and at the same time contribute to the topics listed above. Successful candidates will be furthermore given the opportunity to work with undergraduate students, M.Sc. students, and PhD students.

The research group collaborates internationally and nationally with research groups in construction, computer vision, robotics, mobile heavy machines, human-robot interaction, reinforcement learning, imitation learning, multi-agent systems, under-water vehicles, and robot motion planning. There will be ample opportunities for international collaboration.

The postdoctoral researcher will head a work package focused on measuring and mapping the geography of cloud computing. In particular, the work entails developing new ways of estimating and mapping which organizations, sectors, and countries are basing their digital infrastructures on which (cloud) platforms. The focus will be on public and financial sector organizations, two sectors that provide critical services to societies.

Methods already piloted for this work package include DNS queries, analysis of job advertisement data, and freedom of information requests. The aim is to scale up such experiments into a semi-automated data collection and visualization system that will serve as a public online resource for researchers, policy makers, and journalists interested in understanding whose computational infrastructures societies are depending upon and how this may be changing over time.

The postdoctoral researcher will be supported and supervised by Professor Lehdonvirta and assisted by a team of doctoral researchers, research assistants, and external specialists as needed in areas such as infrastructure engineering and data visualization.

This is a demanding postdoctoral position that requires strong technical and communication skills, and in return offers excellent career development opportunities, including co-authoring opportunities, graduate supervision opportunities, conference travel funding, training courses, access to academic networks in Helsinki, Oxford, and beyond, and support in grant writing. In particular, Professor Lehdonvirta is keen to support senior team members in ultimately developing their own ERC Starting Grant applications.

The research will focus on new frontiers of quantum geometric superconductivity such as non-equilibrium and dynamical phenomena in flat bands and includes collaboration with experimentalists. The goal is to understand how supercurrent and dissipative currents behave in flat band systems and in presence of quantum geometry, under non-equilibrium conditions. We are expecting to discover novel fundamental behavior and phenomena, as well as give predictions for non-equilibrium experiments and new generation of superconducting devices. 

There are possibilities for research collaboration and extended visits to the following partners of the Simons Collaboration and their institutions: Andrei Bernevig (Princeton University), Kristjan Haule (Rutgers University), Miguel Marques (Ruhr University Bochum) and Andrew Millis (Columbia University and Flatiron Institute). There are also other postdoc positions available within the Simons Collaboration, see here. The research involves close collaboration with experimentalists of the SuperC collaboration, particularly Dmitri Efetov and Milan Allan (LMU Munich) and Pertti Hakonen (Aalto University).

We search for a Postdoctoral Researcher with strong analytical skills and experience in quantum many-body theory, preferably in the fields of superconductivity, quantum geometry, quantum transport and/or topological physics. Experience on linear response theory and Keldysh techniques is highly appreciated. Expertise on numerical methods such as dynamical mean-field theory, quantum Monte Carlo, exact diagonalization, density-functional theory, non-equilibrium methods and/or machine learning is an additional bonus.

The Quantum Dynamics group led by Päivi Törmä has pioneered the idea that quantum geometry and topology allows supercurrent and superconductivity in flat bands where non-interacting particles are localized (Peotta and Törmä, Nature Communications 6, 8944 (2015)). Recently these concepts have become relevant for instance in the context of flat band superconductivity in twisted bilayer graphene (Törmä, Peotta, Bernevig, Nature Reviews Physics 4, 528 (2022). Tero Heikkilä is a pioneer in flat band superconductivity, especially on the potential of this mechanism to increase the critical temperature (Phys. Rev. B 83, 220503(R) (2011) – High-temperature surface superconductivity in topological flat-band systems (aps.org)). He is also an expert in superconducting (nano)electronics and related non-equilibrium phenomena (Rev. Mod. Phys. 90, 041001 (2018) – Colloquium: Nonequilibrium effects in superconductors with a spin-splitting field (aps.org)).

to carry out experimental research on different projects related to quantum micromechanical systems. In our team, we investigate how mechanical oscillators can be utilized for fundamental research probing quantum mechanics in massive systems, or for usage in quantum information processing. The measurements are carried out at deep cryogenic temperatures in a dilution refrigerator. In our research, we have demonstrated quantum entanglement between two micromechanical oscillators realized as vibrating aluminum drumheads [Nature 556, 478 (2018), Science 372, 625 (2021)].

We are looking for an outstanding postdoc to join the Optics and Photonics group for theoretical and experimental research on nanophotonics. The research will be focused on the development of novel approaches to design, create, and investigate photonic metasurfaces that efficiently trap light and enhance nonlinear optical phenomena. The position is fully funded by the Research Council of Finland and involves collaboration with researchers from the Department of Electronics and Nanoengineering at Aalto University, as well as international collaboration with a research team from the Netherlands.

The risk of large wildfires that can threat urban environments is expected to increase in Boreal regions due to the longer and more frequent hot and dry seasons. When assessing the consequences of such fires in the vicinity of buildings, computational models play an important role. A key step of modelling is the formation of fuel models that predict the heat transfer, pyrolysis, and heat release from vegetation particles. Aalto University has a already strong group of CFD sub-model development and validation, and the new post-doctoral researcher will extend this research towards forest fuels.

The goal of the research project is to characterize five different fuel particulates from Finnish forests, formulate pyrolysis models and, together with our partners, validate them using laboratory and field experiments. The main computational tool will be FDS. Model development includes creation of a particle cloud description from remote sensing data.