Rate My Professor Paula Jouhten

Paula Jouhten is an Associate Professor of Microbial Physiology in the Department of Bioproducts and Biosystems at Aalto University School of Chemical Engineering, where she leads the Microbial Physiology research group and serves as Programme Director for the Master’s Programme in Biotechnology. Appointed to a five-year fixed-term position on 1 January 2022, she earned her Doctor of Science in Technology (D.Sc. Tech.) in Bioprocess Engineering from Helsinki University of Technology—now part of Aalto University—in 2009. Prior to this, Jouhten held the position of Research Team Leader at VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland Ltd, overseeing the Bioanalytics and Biological Data Science team for two years. She completed a three-year postdoctoral fellowship as a Computational Biologist at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany, and undertook several shorter research visits to international laboratories. Her career combines computational modeling with experimental microbiology to address challenges in microbial cell factories.

Jouhten’s research specializes in microbial physiology, focusing on controlling cellular metabolism to enable sustainable production of chemicals, replacing oil-based processes with bioinspired alternatives. Her group develops mechanistic and data-driven models for designing microbial functions, exploits genetic dependencies to direct evolution toward high-yield production, and optimizes hosts like Saccharomyces cerevisiae for industrial biotechnology. Notable contributions align with UN Sustainable Development Goals such as affordable clean energy, industry innovation, responsible consumption, and climate action. Key publications include “Model-guided chemical environment and metabolic network design to couple pathways with cell fitness” (Metabolic Engineering Communications, 2025), “Structure-filtered search of enzyme variants” (Computational and Structural Biotechnology Journal, 2025), “Highly parallelized laboratory evolution of wine yeasts for enhanced metabolic phenotypes” (Molecular Systems Biology, 2024), “Genome-scale metabolic models reveal determinants of phenotypic differences in non-Saccharomyces yeasts” (BMC Bioinformatics, 2023), “Inducible Synthetic Growth Regulation Using the ClpXP Proteasome Enhances cis,cis-Muconic Acid and Glycolic Acid Yields in Saccharomyces cerevisiae” (ACS Synthetic Biology, 2023), and “Predictive evolution of metabolic phenotypes using model-designed environments” (Molecular Systems Biology, 2022). She has secured funding for projects on biotechnological CO2 valorization.