Scientific Advisory Board

Management of School of Electrical Engineering

The Scientific Advisory Board has an important function in supporting the school’s research activities by having a monitoring and advising role in the discussions of the current state, plans and goals of the school.

A group of people (SAB) wearing name badges standing in front of a staircase with plants around.

The Scientific Advisory Board has an important function in discussing the plans and goals with our School community and supporting the development of our School's research quality. The management team of the school chooses the Scientific Advisory Board members based on the suggestions made by the departments. The Scientific Advisory Boards of Aalto schools met in November 2024 with the specific task of providing critical, forward-looking recommendations on how each department can reach the next scientific level. In the School of Electrical Engineering, we focused on:

Succeeding in international competition with a focus on recruitment
Developing doctoral education
Managing and developing research infrastructures

During their three-day visit at the School of Electrical Engineering, the Scientific Advisory Board met the Management Team of the school, and had discussions with doctoral researchers and assistant professors from each department. The Scientific Advisory Board also visited school’s research infrastructures, including Micronova, Aalto Acoustics Lab, ePowerHub, Robot Lab, and Aalto Electronics-ICT.

Scientific Advisory Board’s recommendations for the School of Electrical Engineering

All the recommendations are available in the Aalto SharePoint: .

In professor recruitment, the recommendations included, among other things, improving of publicity and promotion of our research, creating new practices for recruitment, and developing the mentoring practices. In doctoral education, the recommendations included, among other things, developing the recruitment practices and improving the support structures for doctoral students, for example by introducing an annual appraisal meeting and making appointment of a second advisor mandatory. For research infrastructures, the recommendations included, among other things, re-clustering of the research infrastructures, developing their funding model, and improving the visibility of the research infrastructures. A detailed descriptions of the report is available

Processing the Scientific Advisory Board’s recommendations

The Scientific Advisory Board gives recommendations to the departments and the school. The recommendations are first discussed in the management team of the school. The department level recommendations are discussed by each department, whereas the school level recommendations are discussed both by departments and on the professors’ lunch.

Based on the feedback from the departments and the professors, the management team of the school finalises the prioritization of the recommendations. Actions based on the SAB’s recommendations are decided in the University Dialogue. The recommendations are then integrated into the strategic plan of the School of Electrical Engineering.

Scientific Advisory Board of Aalto ELEC 2024:

Professor Ana García Armada, University Carlos III of Madrid
Professor Danijela Cabric, University of California, Los Angeles
Professor Jutta Hanson, Technical University of Darmstadt
Professor Clivia M. Sotomayor Torres, International Iberian Nanotechnology Laboratory
Professor Emeritus Jens Zander,KTH Royal Institute of Technology
Professor Karl-Erik Årzén, Lund University

Professor Jens Zander was invited to chair the Board.

Jens Zander

Professor, KTH Royal Institute of Technology

Professor Zander received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Linkoping University, Sweden in 1979 and 1985. Since 1989 he is a full professor at KTH –The Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden.
In 2001 he became co-founder and Scientific Director of Wireless@KTH, the KTH Center for Wireless Systems. 2013 -2017 he was the Dean of the KTH School of ICT and in 2018-2020 he was the first Dean of the recently founded School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at KTH.
Since 2023 he is professor emeritus at KTH. ' 2007-2021 he was on the board of directors of the Swedish National Post and Telecom Agency (PTS) and a member of the Royal Academy of Engineering Sciences. 1992-2020 he was part-time senior scientific advisor to the National Defence Research Institute(FOI).
Dr Zander has authored more than 300 scientific papers (h>50) and several textbooks on radio communication and radio resource management. In 2014 he was awarded an honorary doctorate at Aalto University in Helsinki, Finland.
He was the Chairman of the IEEE VT/COM Swedish Chapter (2001-2005) and TPC Chair of the IEEE Vehicular Technology Conferences in 1994 and 2004 as well as General Chair for the Crowncom 2012 and IEEE DySPAN 2015 conferences. Further, Dr. Zander was one of the organizers of the Johannesberg Summits on 5G and Future Wireless Systems. Since 2021 he is chairman of the Swedish National Society of Radio Amateurs (SSA).
His current research interests include Wideband HF communication systems as well as architectures and economic models for future wireless infrastructures.

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Professor, International Iberian Nanotechnology Laboratory

Professor Sotomayor Torres obtained her PhD in Physics in 1984 from the University of Manchester, UK. She held tenured academic appointments at Saint Andrews and Glasgow universities in the UK, a C4 professorship at Wuppertal University in Germany and was a research professor at the National university of Ireland University College Cork (Tyndall National Institute).
From 2007 to 2023 she was an ICREA research professor and group leader of the Phononic and Photonic Nanostructures group at the Catalan Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology in Spain. Sotomayor Torres received awards from the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the Nuffield Foundation and an Amelia Earhart Fellowship from ZONTA International (USA).
She carries out research in the science and engineering of phononic nanostructures, nanophotonics and thermal transport. She was a guest professor at the P. Sabatier Univ. Toulouse, at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Sweden and the Mittlesten-Scheid Guest Professor at the University of Wuppertal in Germany. She has supervised over 20 PhD theses and more than 60 postdoctoral researchers.
She has published extensively and has been cited over 12 000 times. Since 1989 Sotomayor Torres has been, and still is, an active participant in European level research and has coordinated several projects. She has held several commissions of trust including membership of the Danish National Research Council board, vice-chair of the Scientific Board of the Silicon Austria Laboratory and co-Chair and Chair of the Advisory Group of the EU Future and Emerging Technologies.
In 2020 she was elected to the Academia Europaea and since 2021 she is a holder of an ERC Advanced Grant carrying out research on phonons for information and communication Technologies. Since September 2023 she is the Director General of the International Iberian Nanotechnology Laboratory (INL) in Brage, Portugal.

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Professor, Lund University

Received his M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering and Ph.D. in Automatic Control from Lund University in 1981 and 1987, respectively. He was appointed as Full Professor in automatic control in 2000.
He has also worked for ABB Corporate Research during 1992-1994. His research interests include cyber-physical systems, real-time systems, real-time and embedded control, control of computer systems, and cloud control.
He is co-director for WASP (Wallenberg AI, Autonomous Systems and Software Program) with responsibility for research program coordination, WASP is the single largest research grant within Engineering Sciences in Sweden ever with a total budget of 550 million EUR. He is also an elected member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences.
He is currently Head of Department for the Department of Automatic Control, Lund University. He has supervised 12 Ph.D. students to completion as the main advisor and is currently main supervisor for 2 Ph.D. students.

Ana García Armada

Professor, University Carlos III of Madrid, Spain

Professor García Armada is leading the Communications Research Group University Carlos III of Madrid, and has served in a variety of management positions (Head of Signal Theory and Communications Department, Vice-dean of Electrical Engineering, Deputy Vice-Chancellor of International Relations, among others).
She has been a visiting scholar at Stanford University, Bell Labs and University of Southampton. She has coordinated a large number national and international research projects in wireless communications as well as contracts with the industry, and published more than 250 papers in international journals and conference proceedings and she holds six granted patents.
Professor García Armada is an IEEE Fellow. She was awarded the third place Bell Labs Prize 2014 for shaping the future of information and communications technology. She received the IEEE ComSoc/KICS Exemplary Global Service Award in 2022.

Danijela Cabric

Professor, University of California

Danijela Cabric is a professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of California, Los Angeles. She received M.S. from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2001 and Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley in 2007, both in Electrical Engineering. In 2008, she joined UCLA as an Assistant Professor, where she heads Cognitive Reconfigurable Embedded Systems lab.
Her current research projects include novel radio architectures, signal processing, communications, machine learning and networking techniques for spectrum sharing, 5G millimeter-wave, massive MIMO and IoT systems. She served as a principal investigator in the three large cross-disciplinary multi-university centers including SRC/JUMP ComSenTer and CONIX, and NSF SpectrumX.
Prof. Cabric was a recipient of the Samueli Fellowship in 2008, the Okawa Foundation Research Grant in 2009, Hellman Fellowship in 2012 and the National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award in 2012, and the Qualcomm Faculty Award in 2020 and 2021. She is an IEEE Fellow.

Jutta Hanson

Professor, Technical University of Darmstadt

Jutta Hanson studied electrical engineering and received her Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the Technical University of Darmstadt in 2000. After more than 10 years in industry she was appointed as professor and head of the Department Electrical Power Systems with Integrating of Renewable Energies at the Technical University of Darmstadt.
Her research focuses on the stability of hybrid AC/DC grids and distribution grid planning, considering energy-optimized districts. Jutta Hanson is a board member of the Energy Technology Society (ETG) of the German VDE Association for Electrical, Electronic & Information Technologies. She heads the VDE/VDI joint committee "Network Control and Network Operation" and the working group on the standardization of short-circuit current calculation.
She is a senator of the Helmholtz Association for the research field of energy, a member of the National Hydrogen Council and a member of the board of trustees of the "Energy Systems of the Future" (ESYS) initiative of the acatech and Leopoldina academies and the Union of the German Academies of Sciences and Humanities. Furthermore she is member of Acatech, the German Academy of Science and Engineering and the Mainz Academy of Sciences and Literature.

Updated: 24.3.2025
Published: 25.5.2020

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Scientific Advisory Board

Scientific Advisory Board’s recommendations for the School of Electrical Engineering

Processing the Scientific Advisory Board’s recommendations

Scientific Advisory Board of Aalto ELEC 2024: