Current news at the Faculty of Mathematics and Science

Associate Professor Paavo Penttilä's research focuses on wood and plant materials as well as products made from them. In April 2025, Penttilä was awarded significant funding of €1,500,000 from the Novo Nordisk Foundation for his research.

Researchers studied the number of butterfly species in Finnish municipalities using over three million butterfly observations reported to the Finnish Biodiversity Information Facility. Kotka was shown to be the most biodiversity-rich municipality.

Freshwater pearl mussel is a very endangered, demanding and sensitive species, which survives only in gravel-bottom rivers with clear and oxygen-rich water. The mussels still live in many rivers but their larvae can survive in only a few of them.

The University of Jyväskylä is involved in the SafeNet project and their responsibility is predicting the current and future diversity of primary and old-growth forests. SafeNet launched on 01 February 2025 and will run for four and a half years.

Doctoral Researcher Mirja Tevio has developed an alternative method for producing theoretical predictions. Compared to traditional methods, this approach involves less model-dependent theoretical uncertainty.

During the experimental phase of Henna Joukainen’s doctoral thesis presents her study of the excited states of three isotopes – arsenic-66, tungsten-165, and tungsten-169 – and the testing of a new detector for recoil-beta tagging.

In 2026 the University of Jyväskylä will launch a new Master of Technology programme in Statistics and Data Science.

Doctoral Researcher Joona Kasurinen determined the probabilities of certain scattering events in his dissertation work. The public examination of Joona Kasurinen's dissertation is held on Friday 16.5.2025 at 12.00.

Recycling silver from waste is becoming important for securing the supply of the precious metal. The University of Jyväskylä were collaborating with the University of Helsinki to develop a new method for extracting silver from electronic waste.

Adrian Montes Plaza combined in his doctoral thesis the results from two experiments in which Pb-190 was produced via fusion-evaporation reactions and that were conducted at the Accelerator Laboratory of the University of Jyväskylä.

Researchers at the University of Jyväskylä have discovered a potential nuclear beta decay that could be used for antineutrino mass determination. The study has been published in the highly respected Physical Review Letters.

The research in the dissertation of Matti Hellgren focused on the scattering of neutrinos off experimentally relevant target nuclei. The results can potentially be used to improve the understanding of e.g. supernova core-collapse events.