Read more about how it all started with fundamental research and an interdisciplinary collaboration between neuroscientists, including Eero Castrén and his team, and computational biophysicists led by Ilpo Vattulainen at the University of Helsinki. Their long-term collaboration ultimately led to the spinout company Kasvu Therapeutics, which has now raised €30 million to develop new pharmaceuticals…

The 2026 Körber European Science Prize has been awarded to Sara Wickström for her pioneering discoveries into how cells sense and respond to the physical world around them. The prestigious prize honours outstanding scientists conducting research in Europe and alternates annually between the life sciences and physical sciences. With prize money of €1 million, the…

The fifth annual meeting took place in a former Turku prison (I hope everyone slept well)! We had excellent scientific discussions as always and this time we also had a lively career discussion panel led by Johanna, Sara and Ilpo. It was interesting to hear the different perspectives of the PIs regarding interviews, expectations, management…

It was a pleasure to host our Helsinki teams in Turku! The Ivaska lab provided training in basic lab techniques to the computational team and shared more advanced approaches with the other cell biologists. The highlight was of course seeing the computational team, including Ilpo, in lab coats 🙂 and the pizza of course! Looking…

We are very proud to announce that Sara, together with Daniel St Johnston and Ewa Paluch from the University of Cambridge (UK), have received an ERC Synergy Grant to study how cells shape and function in tissues. This prestigious award provides 8.5 million euros over six years. The multidisciplinary project called EPIRAP (robustness and plasticity…

We are very proud to announce that today our CoE director was the recipient of the Finnish Science Award! The Biennial prize (est. 1997) is the most prestigious national science award in Finland given by the Ministry of Education and Culture based on recommendations from the Research Council of Finland Board. Johanna was described as…

It was a great pleasure to have the opportunity to meet everyone again under one roof. We had talks from postdocs, PhD students and PIs and an active poster session! We also had a lot of fun competing in teams against each other in the CoE “Olympics” organised by Gautier! Great scientific discussions and a…

A huge thanks to the Vattulainen team for organising this workshop, giving us a glimpse into their world of biomolecular simulations and helping us understand the general workflow of computational research. The two day workshop consisted of understanding the possibilities and limitations of classical molecular dynamics simulations, performing simple analysis and visualization of molecular dynamics…

Last week we watched nervously as seven PhD student finalists from the University of Turku described their work to a lay audience using one slide, no animation in under three minutes in the three-minute thesis (3MT) competition! It was exciting stuff! Omkar from our Centre was selected to the next stage of the SANORD (South…