Our solar group


Learning RHESSI software can be tedious - solar PhD students Niina and Mikko (from University of Helsinki) enjoy the warm weather in Meudon, Observatoire de Paris in France, in March 2004 when there is still winter time in Finland! group members







whoami Silja Pohjolainen (PhD, Adjunct Prof.) is the solar project coordinator. Besides analysing flares and CMEs at Tuorla she teaches Astronomy and Solar Physics at the Physics Department. She has supervised the PhD thesis work of Niina Lehtinen and the Master's thesis work of Jani Achren. (Silja's Homepage)
whoami Esko Valtaoja (PhD, Prof.) is doing solar research part time. Besides teaching and investigating black holes, he is promoting new solar instrumentation and instructing PhD students.
whoami Alexander Riehokainen (PhD) did his thesis on radio bright regions and is now heading for new subjects. He is interested in solar oscillations and will also take part in the maintenance of the solar radio telescope system TUBE which was moved from Bern (Switzerland) to Tuorla in 2005.
whoami Kaj Wiik (PhD, Laboratory engineer) is an expert in VLBI and radio instrumentation. He also knows about Linux and Perl, and finds out what to do when we say 'this solar software is not working....'. But we can only use him part time.

Former members of the group:

whoami Niina Lehtinen (Finnish Graduate School in Astronomy and Space Physics) did multi-wavelength analysis of solar eruptions as her PhD thesis work supervised by Silja. She defended her thesis on August 8, 2007 at the Physics Department, University of Turku. She is now working in industry.

whoami Jani Achrén finished his M.Sc. thesis in July 2007. In his thesis he summarised the various emission mechanisms that can be identified in solar radiation, and wrote a computer code for analysing the output from using different parameters. He has since moved to Japan.



How to contact us? Email to the person in question, to Firstname.Lastname@utu.fi , or send a letter to Tuorla Observatory, Väisäläntie 20, FI-21500 Piikkiö, Finland.

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