Dr. Sams is a professor (emeritus) of Cognitive Neuroscience at the Aalto University School of Science. He is affiliated to the Department of Neuroscience and Biomedical Engineering. He is the leader of the MAGICS infrastructure consortium and academic leader of MAGICS Aalto. His job title is Senior Advisor.

Dr. Sams was among the pioneers to show that non-invasive event-related brain responses provide an important tool to study neurophysiology underlying cognitive processes of the human brain. Dr. Sams’ early career concentrated on auditory neuroscience and later on multisensory perception. Dr. Sams started developing facial animations capable of audiovisual speech and expressing facial emotions. He also studied Human Brain-Computer interfaces, which has become a very extensive research area. His recent neuroscience research interest has been naturalistic neuroscience.

Dr. Sams was invited to take a newly established chair of cognitive science and technology in Helsinki University of Technology (TKK) in 1998. He was appointed as an academy professor for the period 1.8.2002–31.7.2007.

Dr. Sams’ supervised students, currently professors, are Kimmo Alho (University of Helsinki), Veikko Surakka (Tampere University), Tobias Andersen (Technical University of Denmark) and Riikka Möttönen (University of Helsinki).

Dr. Sams activities include collaboration with musicians. He organized with his colleagues four concerts in The Turku Music Festival during 2010–2013 and one in Helsinki Festival in 2016. Dr. Sams’ research group also participated in visualization of the performance of Rite of Spring in the opening concert of Turku Music Festival in 2011.