Academy Funds Advanced Chemical Imaging Hub for Finland

From a total of 13million Euros announced in December 2019 by the Academy of Finland in support of ten national research infrastructures, 1.6 million euros will fund a new opening, Quantitative chemically-specific imaging infrastructure for material and life sciences (qCSI), The research infrastructure partners are the University of Helsinki, with involvement from its Pharmacy, Science (Chemistry) and Medicine Faculties; the University of Jyväskylä and LUT University.

The qCSI infrastructure will be a world-class infrastructure for advanced vibrational spectroscopic imaging.  The imaging infrastructure will be used for various types of applications in the material and life sciences, involving pharmaceuticals, nanomaterials, foods, cells and tissues. The qCSI infrastructure will open up completely new avenues of research for advanced chemical imaging in Finland.

"This funding allows us to develop an internationally unique infrastructure for Finnish and international researchers interested in high-resolution molecular-level imaging of complex systems. We will establish two new open-access vibrational spectroscopic imaging instruments: fast multiplex coherent Raman and near-field infrared and integrate them with an advanced spectral data processing and analysis platform. A real strength is the synergistic expertise of the partners in spectroscopy, imaging, data analysis and application disciplines, such as pharmacy, medicine and materials science," explained Head of qCSI infrastructure Professor Clare Strachan from the University of Helsinki.

"With this funding, we are able to extend the spatial resolution of spectroscopic and imaging equipment at Laserlab-NSC down to 10 nm. This nanoscale resolution is significant because the characteristic scale for functional biological molecules and electronic devices is on this scale,” said Professor Mika Pettersson from the University of Jyväskylä.

"The funding enables us to develop an open-access spectral data analysis and image generation platform capable of handling large datasets user-friendly and by remote access. This is essential to optimal research outputs with the imaging equipment,” added Professor Erik Vartiainen from the LUT University.