Lari Vähäsalo is a chemistry expert with specialties in wood and paper chemistry, biomass fractionation, analytical, organic and process chemistry. His widely published, industry funded research at the Åbo Akademi university has aimed at developing new analytical techniques for laboratories and on-line applications in the paper industry. One of his key achievements was the introduction of Flow Cytometry to the paper industry – today used by virtually all chemical distributers. Lari has also successfully solved real-life deposition problems in mills around Europe. During his PhD, he developed and patented a system called DepoSense, which detects deposits by analysing the sound made by the paper machine’s press section. One of his specialties is chemometrics – multivariate data analysis of process chemistry. Lari owns Oy ACSI-Solutions Ab, a company focusing on multivariate data analysis, such as analysing and reporting the status of a chemical plant’s process with several thousands of signal inputs. He was also co-founder and chairman of the board of Arbonova, a company which produced and patented the production of bioactive polyphenols for inflammatory and cancer research..

In 2007, Lari was one of the driving forces in developing a hemicellulose extraction process, which later became the starting point of hemicellulose extraction and utilisation research in the Finnish Forest Cluster Future Biorefinery project (currently Fibic, Finnish Bioeconomy Cluster). In 2011, he was part of developing a different hemicellulose extraction method, unrelated to the Fubio process. This method was further enhanced to include the extraction of lignin without sulphur and became the base for the curren activities of CH-Bioforce.

Slogan: if no one else will, I will – define, demonstrate and utilize gravitational force.