Biography of Johannes Frantti
Johannes is a founder and member of the Board of Directors of FRE and Reciprocal Engineering – RE Ltd. He holds a M.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Oulu and a Dr.Tech. degree with honors in Materials Physics from the University of Oulu. During his early career, he worked at the University of Oulu, as a researcher at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, and at the Naval Research Institute in Finland (military service). He received an Academy Research Fellowship and worked at the Helsinki University of Technology.
In 2005 he was ranked as first for the Technical Physics Professor, University of Oulu, by Professor Mike Glazer of University of Oxford. In 2010 he was one of the three finalists for the Professorship in International Energy Science Program at Kyoto University.
He has over twenty-five years of experience in materials physics, including both experimental and theoretical studies of various functional materials, such as ferroelectric, magnetic, photocatalytic, and gas-sensor oxides. He is a Docent at the University of Oulu and his teaching experience includes courses and lectures given in various universities and research institutes. In graduate school he became interested in neutron diffraction while modeling Raman scattering data collected on ferroelectric perovskites. At that time, only a handful of structural data were available. While in Japan, he made contact with Professor Sten Eriksson, with whom he performed his first neutron diffraction experiments at the Studsvik Neutron Research Laboratory in Sweden. The value of neutron diffraction in the development of new magnetic materials cannot be overstated. His research experience includes collaborations with major research centers, including the Oak Ridge, Los Alamos, Brookhaven and Argonne National Laboratories, Rutherford and Appleton Laboratory, Paul Scherrer Institut and international universities (e.g., University of Oxford, Simon Fraser University, Chalmers University of Technology and King Abdulaziz University) and research centers. He participates in the activities of the European Spallation Source activities. In 2013 he moved on to the Deep Tech area to develop materials and processing technologies for the semiconductor industry.
He is enthusiastic about applying new materials to industrial applications and prefers to be hands-on in sample synthesis, analysis, modeling, computer code writing, and facility design. His experiments involve state-of-the-art experimental scattering and diffraction and sample synthesis techniques such as neutron and synchrotron X-ray scattering, Raman scattering, electron microscopy, electrical and magnetic characterization methods, and thin film deposition. Early in his career, he built and tested a pulsed laser ablation deposition chamber. He is interested in studying material properties under extreme conditions, for example, large hydrostatic pressure neutron powder diffraction studies. Raman scattering has been an important technique in his studies, as demonstrated by the seven-year period spent at the Tokyo Institute of Technology in Japan, where his focus was on Raman and resonant Raman scattering measurements.
To model and analyze the experimental data, he applies various theoretical and computational methods, including methods and computer codes developed by him and his collaborators for parallel computing platforms. He also uses techniques based on density functional theory, Rietveld refinement, and various quantum mechanical models. He reads mathematics, physics, and technical literature daily. Both supercomputers and PC computers are used for modeling and analysis work. He has written software to compute X-ray scattering from thin films and nanoparticles, first on supercomputers and then on desktop computers as their computing power became sufficient for more demanding computations. Results have been published in numerous scientific articles and key features have been patented. His current interests are in the development of new insulating room temperature ferromagnetic materials for all-spin logic, memory, microwave and RF devices, and computational electromagnetics. Other patented work includes multistate memory and high temperature superconductors. In collaboration with the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences (CNMS) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Johannes developed a resettable photoresist and etch-free direct writing patterning technology.
Johannes has authored or co-authored approximately 100 scientific research papers with over 2000 citations, including peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, and conference papers, and has issued and pending patents. He is a reviewer for several journals in materials physics and chemistry, including many flagship journals. Although he believes that publications are an important form of documentation, it is the new discoveries - materials, methods and technology - that should always be the focus.
He is a Finnish native speaker and speaks Japanese.