University of Turku

The team at the University of Turku (UTU) in SPEARHEAD is based in the Space Research Laboratory (SRL), Department of Physics and Astronomy. UTU will lead the WP6 and participate in all other WPs. The team at UTU is led by Prof. Rami Vainio. Prof. Vainio is a leading expert in SEP acceleration and transport modelling, and the PI of SOHO / ERNE, co-PI of BepiColombo / SIXS and a co-I of Solar Orbiter / EPD and MAG. He also has a long experience in collaborative EU projects since FP7 and has acted as a scientific coordinator for FP7 / SEPServer (2010-2013) and as the PI of H2020 / SERPENTINE (2021–2024), and as a WP leader in H2020 / HESPERIA (2015–2017). In addition, he has participated as a team member in FP7 / SPACECAST (2011–2014) and UTU team leader in H2020 / EUHFORIA 2.0 (2019–2022). He has also led the research at UTU in recent ESA projects HIERRAS (2019–2023) and ASPECS (2017–2022) and continues to lead the UTU-SRL expert group in ESA’s Space Radiation Expert Service Centre (2014–). Prof. Vainio is also the vice-head of the Finnish Centre of Excellence in Research of Sustainable Space (Academy of Finland, 2018–2025) He will supervise the work of UTU in WPs 2, 3 and 5.

Other team members at UTU include Dr. Jan Gieseler, who is an expert of SEP event data analysis methods, cosmic-ray modulation and tool distribution. Dr. Gieseler has been in a key role in developing the Jupyter Notebook -based analysis tools of the H2020 / SERPENTINE project. In SPEARHEAD, Dr. Gieseler will act as the leader of WP6. In addition, he will contribute to the re-calibration efforts in WP3 and scientific data analysis in WP5. Dr. Diana Morosan will participate in the radio data analysis (WP4). She is a world-leading expert in solar radio astronomy and interferometry. Dr. Philipp Oleynik is an expert in particle instrument simulations using Geant4 and will contribute to WPs 2 and 3. Mr. Pasi Virtanen is a mechanical engineer, responsible for the CAD modelling of the instruments developed at UTU, and will participate in WP2. Mr. Christian Palmroos will participate in the scientific data analysis (WP5).