Projects of Professor Antti Poso and Associate Professor Timo Lähivaara received over 800,000 euros funding from the Research Council of Finland.
The Research Council of Finland has granted a total of 800,000 euros of special funding for international collaboration in high-performance computing to the University of Eastern Finland for two projects. The Research Council of Finland made the decisions on funding on 16 December 2025. The RCF granted funding for twelve projects, totalling 6.4 million euros for 2026–2028.
Funded projects are MAMMUTTI, led by Professor of Drug Design Antti Poso from the School of Pharmacy, and InterpAI-CoM, in which Associate Professor Timo Lähivaara from the Department of Technical Physics is a partner. The university's share of the funding for the three-year project MAMMUTTI is 500,000 euros, and for the InterpAI-CoM project 300,641 euros.
MAMMUTTI project focuses on combining artificial intelligence (AI) and molecular dynamics (MD) to study medically significant monomeric and multimeric targets. The research will be conducted at the University of Eastern Finland in collaboration with the University Hospital of Tübingen. The objective of the research is to develop more efficient drug design processes that consider the dynamic nature of targets. This can lead to better drug candidates and save resources in experimental work. Additionally, the research promotes the use of open-source software and the democratization of research.
InterpAI-CoM project is connected to modeling for groundwater contamination dynamics and mitigation. Sustainable groundwater management and protection of water resources against contamination require detailed understanding of how contaminants propagate and spread in the subsurface. This requires computer models able to capture physical and chemical processes driving such movement. However, the state-of-the art models are often slow because of a multitude of processes, complicating their applications in decision-making purposes. To address these challenges, the InterpAI-CoM project develops a novel approach that integrates artificial intelligence with scientific computing of reactive transport processes. The goal is to produce predictions that are faster, while maintaining the similar process details as considered in physical based models.
The call ‘2025 Special funding for international collaboration in high-performance computing’ was based on Finland’s strategic international partnerships with US, British, Japanese and Canadian partners in areas such as digitalisation, artificial intelligence, sustainable development and the green economy.
The funding will support the use of EuroHPC’s high-performance computing resources and the LUMI supercomputer within the framework of international research collaboration. The funding helps develop a versatile future computing ecosystem and expand computing expertise in Finland and globally. The funded projects focus in particular on computational science and computational data analysis.
Source: Research Council of Finland