Career paths at HIIT

HIIT is a research institute you can join and leave at any stage of your research career. Below are some examples of career paths that people can take at HIIT.

Wray Buntine worked for NASA Ames Research Center, UC Berkeley, and Google, before joining HIIT as a senior researcher. He relocated from HIIT to Canberra, Australia in 2007 to join NICTA, Australia's ICT Research Centre of Excellence. He is now a principal researcher at NICTA's Canberra Lab, and an Adjunct at the Australian National University. "HIIT was an excellent place to expand my horizons.  Would highly recommend it!" says Wray.

Elisabeth Georgii wrote her PhD thesis in Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics and at Friedrich Miescher Laboratory of the Max Planck Society. She joined HIIT for her post doc period and was later appointed for a 3-year position at HIIT starting at 2010.

Urs Köster received his Master's degree from the University of St. Andrews and joined HIIT to write his PhD thesis in 2004. After graduation in 2009 he left for a post doc position at the University of California at Berkeley.

Valentin Polishchuk received his PhD degree from Stony Brook University and joined HIIT for a post doc period in 2007. He recently received a grant from the Academy of Finland and is now building his own research group at HIIT.

Gemma Garriga got her PhD degree in 2006 at UPC Barcelona, Spain. In 2006-2009 she was a postdoc researher at HIIT. In 2010 she moved to Paris to work at the University of Paris 6, France, and later in 2010 she was appointed Research Scientist CR1 at INRIA, France.

Henry Tirri was one of the first group leaders at HIIT and a professor in 1998-2008, during which time he made long research visits to top tier research institutes worldwide. He was a co-founder of Ekahau Inc. He is now the CTO of Nokia.

Airi Lampinen joined HIIT in 2007 to work on her Master's Thesis. Upon graduation from the Department of Social Psychology, University of Helsinki, she continued at HIIT, working on her PhD. In 2010-2011 she is a Fulbright Scholar at the School of Information at University of California, Berkeley, working with the Californian end of Aalto's OtaSizzle research project.

Mika Raento wrote his PhD thesis at HIIT, during which he co-founded a very successful start-up company Jaiku Ltd. Jaiku was later acquired by Google and Mika also joined Google. He then moved forward and now works in a high-technology start-up Zenrobotics Ltd which specializes in robotic recycling technology.