Holiday Season/Christmas is approaching. We hope that your year has been fruitful and productive despite of still ongoing Covid19 pandemic. Creativity, innovation and learning need also rest and fun. Let’s hope that you also have some during the Christmas.

The purpose of our Society is to boost associate professors (Finnish dosentti) and their issues. We meet regularly with the head of the university, the president and the provost to discuss our members’ problems. The main topics, we covered, have been access to email and intra. Provost promised that associate professors can have 2 years resource agreement if they needed. We also discussed problems to function as a main supervision /PI, custos and opponent as well as equality in overheads. We continue the discussion with the president and provost next springtime. This year we also nominated the associate professor of the year (Ass prof Emma Raitoharju). We had celebration at 9th of September where Raitoharju gave a presentation and got the reward. Raitoharju also had a lecture in "Kaiken Maailman Dosentit- tutkittua tietoa" seminar in Helsinki in October.

Our biggest task was to publicize the English translation of Finnish word Dosentti to be Associate professor. For this purpose, we together with Finnish Associate Professor Union (Suomen Dosenttiliitto) had fruitful discussions with our stakeholders / partners as well as we wrote in Finnish opinion pieces in several newspapers and Finnish academic journals including Acatiimi. We hope that you will actively use Associate professor title in international co-operation and connections.

Next year we’ll arrange seminars and discussion events: Evening for the New Associate professors in April and the nomination of the associate professor of the year in September. Welcome to our activity.

Happy Holidays/ Merry Christmas !

Tanja Pessi
The Chair, Tampere Association of Associate Professors, Your Society
The Chair, Suomen Dosenttiliitto