The Department of Physics at the University of Jyvaskyla has 16 full professors and well above a 100 other members of staff. There are c. 500 undergraduate students and c. 80 graduate students in the Department, and it is currently one of the 10 Centres of Excellence in Student Training nominated by the Ministry of Education in Finnish universities.
The Department hosts an Accelerator Laboratory, and Nuclear and Accelerator Based Physics is one of the c. 30 current Centres of Excellence in Research nominated by the Academy of Finland. Research in the Department is divided into nuclear and accelerator based physics and materials physics of roughly equal size, and a smaller activity in high energy physics. The soft condensed matter and statistical physics group of two professors and c. 20 other members, taking part in the CRESTA project, is part of the materials physics activity. The research area of this group most relevant to this project is complex fluid flow problems and transport in porous media with biomedical applications. This research area has included for the last 15 years direct numerical simulations of various flow and transport systems based on the lattice Boltzmann method, and optimization of such methods for large scale parallel computing.
