At the start of March 2020, the building physics research group of Tampere University reached a milestone of 20 members for the first time. The group was founded in 1994 and its 25th anniversary was celebrated last fall at Tampere Hall in the Finnish Building Physics Conference, organized for the sixth time. The significance of building physics constantly grows as the moisture loads caused by climate change increase and the energy efficiency of buildings improves, as well as due to the moisture and microbe damage broadly apparent in the building stock. This has also been seen in the strong increase in the need for research.
For many years we have been in a situation, where we can’t accept all offered research projects, because we don’t have enough workers, says the head of the research group Professor Juha Vinha. There is a high demand for experts of building physics in companies, so members of the research group and master’s thesis workers transfer to them often. In recent years a solution has been found, where some of the researchers work part-time in the research group and part-time in a company, which benefits both parties. Of course, we’d like to have more full-time researchers too.