Aalto-India go-global collaboration initiative
The project Complementary biomaterials research approach - towards high value-added biomaterials has developed collaborative research activities which are a capstone for furthering the research towards evaluating the translational capabilities of some of the materials fabricated at Aalto University. The research findings and materials (Medical Biopolymers) are shared with collaborators from the Department of Biological Sciences and Bioengineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur (IIT-Kanpur), who are keenly interested in evaluating the biological and biocompatibility aspects of the developed materials.
Aalto University with specialties in medical polymeric bio-materials development and advanced fabrication technologies, and IIT-Kanpur with expertise and facilities for the biological evaluation of the materials using cells, stem cells and small animal models are two complementary institutions that both have the capacity to further this Indo-Finnish collaboration.
Mobility plans are a key aspect in developing research between the partners. Therefore, as part of the Aalto-India Go-global initiative, Professor Ashok Kumar visited Aalto University for a period of 45 days. During this period, several research meetings were carried out to discuss the various aspects of research work to be conducted by each institution. The Indian SPARC program (Scheme for Promotion of Academic and Research Collaboration) has also funded several researchers between India and Finland. Two postdoctoral students; Dr. Prerna Singh and Dr. Shazia Shaikh, visited the Polymer Technology research group at Aalto University from July-2022 to August-2022 for a period of two months and Professor Jukka Seppälä was a visiting professor at IIT Kanpur in December 2022. This is prospected to lead to 4 joint publications in the near future. During his visit to the IIT Kanpur, Professor Seppälä had interesting discussions with the offices of Innovations management and with the Dean of International Relations. He was also invited as a plenary speaker for the BIO-Remedi 2022 conference (International conference on Biomaterials, Regenerative Medicine and Devices) at the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati (IITG), Assam, India. In addition professors Seppälä and Partanen from Aalto University presented virtually the collaboration’s results in the Conference RABSRM in Srinagar in India, Kashmir May 2022.
In 2022, the research team presented some of the outcomes of the collaboration at Nordic Polymer Days 2022 in Sweden. The outcomes were also presented again in 2023 in Sweden and Denmark. The title of the presentation was “Cationically Supercharged Multifunctional Polysaccharides for Medical and Environmental Applications”.
According to Professor Kumar, this collaboration has led a strong base of academic and research cooperation between two premier institutions in India and Finland. The Aalto-India Go-global and SPARC (Ministry of Education, India) initiatives have benefited both research teams to conduct complimentary cutting-edge research, hold scientific meetings, made exchange visits and expanded the research network in Europe and India. Thus, a strong cooperation between two Institutes in Finland and India is developed and this collaboration is growing stronger, with innovative ideas from both ends being worked on and new technology developments in biomedical research being perceived.