He has served as an associate editor for IEEE Signal Processing Letters and IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing. He has served as co-editor for two IEEE JSTSP special issues. He was a member of editorial board for IEEE Signal Processing Magazine. He has been a member of the IEEE Signal Processing Society technical committees SPCOM-TC and SAM-TC. He was the general chair of the IEEE SPAWC 2007 conference in Helsinki, Finland June 2007. He was the Technical Program Chair for the IEEE SPAWC 2015 in Stockholm. He was the General Chair of 2018 Asilomar Conference.

Dr. Koivunen's research interest include statistical, communications, sensor array and multichannel signal processing and their applications in wireless comms, future radar systems, csmart grid and data science. He has published more than 430 papers in international scientific conferences and journals and holds 5 patents. He has advised 28 doctoral theses in these research topics. He co-authored the papers receiving the best paper award in IEEE PIMRC 2005, EUSIPCO'2006,EUCAP (European Conference on Antennas and Propagation) 2006 and COCORA 2012. He has been awarded the IEEE Signal Processing Society best paper award for the year 2007 (with J. Eriksson) and for the second time in 2017 (with Zoubir et al). he has been primary adviser of 28 doctoral thesis works.

He has been awarded the 2015 EURASIP (European Association for Signal Processing) Technical Achievement Award for fundamental contributions to statistical signal processing and its applications in wireless communications, radar and related fields. He was a member of the IEEE Fourier Award committee 2016-2018.