{"id":100869,"date":"2026-01-30T17:10:06","date_gmt":"2026-01-30T17:10:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/100869\/"},"modified":"2026-01-30T17:10:06","modified_gmt":"2026-01-30T17:10:06","slug":"finlands-ambassador-to-the-u-s-speaks-at-scranton-photos-video","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/100869\/","title":{"rendered":"Finland\u2019s Ambassador to the U.S. Speaks at Scranton (Photos + Video)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The ninth presentation in the Jay Nathan, Ph.D., Visiting Scholar Lecture Series featured remarks by a career diplomat and additional programming that celebrated her native country.<\/p>\n<p>Leena-Kaisa Mikkola, Ambassador of Finland to the U.S., participated in the program, titled, \u201cFinland: History. Culture. Economy,\u201d on Thursday, Jan. 15, at the PNC Auditorium inside The University of Scranton\u2019s Loyola Science Center.<\/p>\n<p>Mikkola, who previously served as Ambassador to China (2021-2024) and Israel (2011-2016) and as Director General for Africa and the Middle East (2017-2021), has been in her current role since September 2024. She spoke alongside Petri Koikkalainen, senior specialist for science and higher education.<\/p>\n<p>In addition to the lecture, the evening\u2019s events included live performances by Finnish singer Josefin Sil\u00e9n and Finnish classical pianist Markus Kaitila, as well as a reception.<\/p>\n<p>Previous Nathan lecturers have included representatives from Denmark, Iceland, Lithuania, Romania, India, Thailand, Mongolia, Kazakhstan and Central Asia.<\/p>\n<p>For more information, please see\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.scranton.edu\/academics\/wml\/events-and-programs\/jay-nathan\/index.shtml\" rel=\"noopener nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">the series\u2019 webpage<\/a>\u00a0on The University of Scranton\u2019s website.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The ninth presentation in the Jay Nathan, Ph.D., Visiting Scholar Lecture Series featured remarks by a career diplomat&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":100870,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[6033,61,49172,94,27841,49171,178,180,179,274],"class_list":{"0":"post-100869","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-scranton","8":"tag-culture","9":"tag-economy","10":"tag-finland","11":"tag-history","12":"tag-international","13":"tag-jay-nathan","14":"tag-scranton","15":"tag-scranton-headlines","16":"tag-scranton-news","17":"tag-the-university-of-scranton"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100869","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=100869"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100869\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/100870"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=100869"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=100869"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=100869"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}