The projects. The achievements. The people. All of it.

Essi Aittasalo

Double alumnus from Finland who has worked for the Ice Hockey World Championships and the International Olympic Committee.

Don’t mess with Essi – she’s an expert in the high octane and incredibly dangerous sport of ice hockey.
Essi is a double alumnus (2019 and 2020), originally from Finland, who grew up honing her stick skills from an early age, but never considered sport a career until she came to university.

Now, she’s made it her own personal mission to get more people into the sport she loves. While she was a Napier student Essi founded the first ever Scottish female ice hockey team, the Caledonia Steel Queens, who went on to win the Women’s Nationals Titles in 2019 and 2022 with a perfect record.

Essi then went on to work in the sports office for the IIHF 2022 Ice Hockey World Championships, and as an Athletes’ Commission for the International Olympic Committee (IOC).

Her advice for new students? Don’t be afraid to take risks. She certainly isn’t.

Multiple Sensor AI Hearing Aids

Napier students are helping create transformative hearing aids which will enhance speech and understanding for the hearing-impaired.

We’re redesigning the current generation of hearing aids by utilising assistive and AI technology, enhancing multi-modal human hearing.

See how we can improve the lives of many people living with hearing impairment.

Dr Pavlos Papadopoulos

Napier Lecturer of Cybersecurity and founder of TrueDeploy.

Dr Pavlos Papadopoulos is a lecturer of cybersecurity at Edinburgh Napier University, where he received his PhD in Privacy-Preserving Systems around security.

Pavlos never stops, with over 25 publications in international journals, conferences and books, and his research has been cited over 400 times. In 2019, he and a team of PhD students from BIL won awards at the Diffusion Berlin Hackathon for their work on “Identity and beyond with Hyperledger”.

Truly an expert in his field, he has also founded TrueDeploy, a venture-funded Scottish Enterprise and Innovate UK for its innovative technology developed from Pavlos’ research. Pavlos has also been involved in teaching courses related to AWS and cloud concepts, operating systems, network security, penetration testing, incident response, and malware analysis.

Winner of "Outstanding Young Person in Cyber" award at the Scottish Cyber Awards 2022. He's unstoppable.

Transforming Timber

A Napier-supported project promoting the use of home-grown timber which saw the first Scottish timber two-storey home displayed at COP26.

Napier is leading research to transform the UK construction industry, creating a sustainably-managed and renewable natural resource out of Scottish forests. It was launched with the first ever two-storey house made entirely from UK timber, which was displayed at Glasgow’s COP26.

See how this initiative is transforming the UK construction industry as a whole.