Professor Tapani Vuorinen of Aalto University received the Wihuri International Prize at a ceremony at Finlandia Hall in Helsinki on 9 October 2026. The award, worth €150,000, honours Finnish or international researchers who further the cultural development of mankind, and was first given in 1958 to the mathematician Rolf Nevanlinna.
Vuorinen has worked in wood chemistry for more than four decades and has published more than 240 scientific articles. In the early 1990s he began a project on pulp bleaching that produced an invention which significantly reduced the environmental impact of the process, recognised in 2003 with the Marcus Wallenberg Prize.
From 2011 he began working with textile design professor Pirjo Kääriäinen, and together they created Chemarts, which combines design and biomaterials expertise. Over around 15 years, the initiative grew from a summer school into a permanent collaboration platform, leading to ‘The Chemarts Cookbook’ in 2020 and a children’s version in 2024.
