Speaker details

Jari Turunen

Jari Turunen (born 1961 in Kerimaki, Finland) received his M.Sc and Ph.D degrees from Helsinki University of Technology (Finland) in 1985 and 1990, respectively. In 1990-1993 he worked for three years at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland, and returned to Helsinki for a year before being invited in 1994 as a Professor of Optoelectronics at the University of Joensuu, Finland. Since 2000 he has held a permanent professorship in physics at the latter university, and currently he enjoys a five-year (2005-2010) Academy professorship. The research interests of Prof. Turunen cover various fundamental and applied aspects of optics, such as diffraction and grating theory, polarization of light, coherence, optical nanostructures, nanolithography, and optical engineering. He is an author of about 180 peer-reviewed papers in these areas, a Topical Editor (diffraction and gratings) of the Journal of the optical Society of America A, and the first recipient of the Vaisala Physics Price awarded by the Finnish Academy of Sciences and Letters in 2000. In his spare time, he is actively building a castle.