Millennium Technology Prize 2018 to Tuomo Suntola - more photos from May 22

On May 22, 2018, Tuomo Suntola was awarded the prestigious Millennium Technology Prize (MTP) for his Atomic Layer Deposition (ALD) invention, awarded every two years for a life-changing innovation. Before Suntola, the MTP in 2016 was awarded to Frances Arnold. Without ALD - an invisible technology as such - Moore's law could not have continued, and we would not have the computing power (computers, smartphones) of today. The BALD Engineering and Atomic Limits blogs are good sources for recent views on the impact and development of ALD. For more on the Millennium Technology Prize, please view the Technology Academy Finland (TAF) website https://taf.fi/; next call for nominations will open in April 2019.

Dr. Tuomo Suntola (left) received the Millennium Technology Prize as the inventor of Atomic Layer Deposition technology. In the middle of the photo, Sauli Niinistö, president of Finland (middle), who handed the prize. At the right, Marja Makarow (professor, chair of Technology Academy Finland). The prize ceremony was organized on May 22, 2018 in Helsinki (Kaapelitehdas).  Photo by Riikka Puurunen, shared in Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

As the drafter of the nomination letter, I was honoured to be invited to the gala event & prize ceremony on May 22, 2018. For me, the prize and the event was literally a dream come true. The event was historical throughout. I wished that more colleagues from the ALD community could have shared the event and the joy and pride.

To record this historical event and to share its details with others, as a hobbyist photographer I took many photos and several short videos at the event. Some I have shared in the ALD History Blog post right after the event, in a video collection on Youtube, and in photos released to Creative Commons.

Now I have gone through my collections again and here I am sharing more photos. I link to the already published Youtube and Wikimedia Commons contents, where appropriate. The photos uploaded in Wikimedia Commons have a Creative Commons (CC) licence that allows everyone to freely use and distribute the photos - the only requirement is that you credit the source and if you make modifications, you share the new versions similarly openly (CC BY-SA 4.0). If you would like to reuse some of the photos shared in the blog but which are not in Wikimedia Commons, please contact me directly - you can find my contact info through the Aalto University website.

Espoo, February 10, 2018

Riikka Puurunen

On how I came up with the "periodic table of ALD processes"

IUPAC, https://www.iypt2019.org/: "1869 is considered as the year of discovery of the Periodic System by Dmitri Mendeleev. 2019 will be the 150th anniversary of the Periodic Table of Chemical Elements and has therefore been proclaimed the "International Year of the Periodic Table of Chemical Elements (IYPT2019)" by the United Nations General Assembly and UNESCO."

In atomic layer deposition, for which Tuomo Suntola in 2018 received the Millennium Technology Prize, the periodic table is a central tool. This was recently highlighted in the Atomic Limits blog, who created a colourful update of the periodic table of ALD processes which I originally created for a review article in 2005 and which was updated for another review article in 2013. In this post, I tell a bit more on how that "periodic table of ALD" was born and updated. But first: a joint picture with Dmitry Mendeleev in St. Petersburg State University, taken - while visiting Prof. Victor Drozd in November 2015 - to honor this great chemist from St. Petersburg.

Then-Dr. Riikka Puurunen (now Prof.) and statue of Prof. Dmitry Mendeleev in the hall of St. Petersburg State University. Photo taken upon request by Prof. Victor Drozd. November 11, 2015. Originally published in http://aldhistory.blogspot.com/2015/11/travel-notes-st-petersburg-puurunen.html.

To the story.