‘Diversities of the Environmental Movement in Russia’ is an academic research project funded by Kone Foundation. We explore the on-going transformations of the environmental movement in Russia. We investigate the current state of the environmental movement, its different forms of action and recent changes in them, and the possibilities of the movement to have an impact on sustainable development. We analyse the transformations of the movement through three case studies: non-governmental organisations (NGOs) focussed on the conservation of biodiversity, alliances between environmental NGOs and indigenous groups, and eco-villages. All these different forms of the environmental movement operate through social networks in Russia and internationally, and in our research we analyse the recent changes in these networks.
Elias Vänskä (elias.vanska@uef.fi)
Developing computational methods for monitoring and quantifying greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
I work in ” Tomography in the field” project that focuses on developing improved methods for assessing GHG balances in agriculture. Acquiring accurate information on the GHG balances in agriculture is essential in determining suitable land use and farming choices. Our method utilizes open-path laser dispersion spectroscopy measurement technology and Bayesian state-space framework to reconstruct emission rates as temporally evolving tomography images. With this approach, spatial variations of the land and the uncertainties related to the monitored area are incorporated in the estimation.
Georgii Krivoshein (georgii.krivoshein@uef.fi)
MD 2020, Kazan State Medical University
EDUFI Scholar 2020 – current, University of Eastern Finland
Research topic: Mechanosensitive ion channels in migraine and stroke pathology
Gleb Iarovoi (gleb.iarovoi@uef.fi)
Having defended my Russian “candidate of science” dissertation in 2007, I am currently writing my “European” PhD thesis, which was devoted to cross-border governance on the EU-Russian border, participatory arrangements in cross-border programmes and the role of non-state actors in inter-regional cooperation. However, after Russian invasion of Ukraine there is no more “cross-border cooperation” and “cross-border governance” on the EU-Russian border. So my current research is being revisited towards exploring the “subaltern geopolitics” of the Finnish-Russian border, i.e. the geopolitical imagination of subaltern groups having direct or indirect relations to this border. Also, as a research hobby and a natural scope of interest, I study academic freedoms in Russia (and Russian academia as subaltern).
As a freetime hobby, for many years now, I do journalism. Previously, I reported on sensitive issues of Russian political and social life, such as human rights violations by the state, by the Russian Orthodox Church, by security agencies and courts. Currently, I cover different issues of the Finnish-Russian relations for Russian readers.
Hang Nguyen (hang.nguyen@uef.fi)
Hang Nguyen is a Post-Doc Researcher at the University of Eastern Finland (UEF) specializing in Intellectual Property (IP) Law. Currently, her research concerns farmers’ privileges in Vietnamese Law compared to the European Union (EU) Law. As an agricultural country, Vietnam’s IP agriculture-related regulations, such as plant variety and farmer’s privileges, are not very developed; meanwhile, these regulations are more advanced in the EU. The comparison between the EU and Vietnam shows what is missing and what can be applied to Vietnam laws. Also, this research points out the possibility to protect Vietnamese agriculture products under other regimes rather than plant variety such as certification marks, collective marks, geographic indications, etc.
Hang Nguyen is a Lecturer at the faculty of Civil Law – Ho Chi Minh City University of Law (HCMU Law), Vietnam. She teaches IP Law, Civil Law, Personal Rights for undergraduate and LL.M students at HCMU Law and other universities as a guest lecturer. She obtained her Master and Doctoral degrees at the Graduate School of Law, Nagoya University, Japan. Her LL.D Dissertation and LL.M thesis were about comparative issues related to trademark laws among the United States, the EU, Japan, and Vietnam. She moved to Finland joined UEF because its Law School offers broad, wide, and profound courses on IP; it is possible to examine different fields related to IP, such as IP and Food/Food Fraud; IP and Internet or IP and International Trade.
Ilkka Huhta (ilkka.huhta@uef.fi)
My research interests are
– Finnish and Scandinavian Church History in 19th and 20th centuries
– Pietism and revival movements
– Religion and nationalism
– The Civil War 1918 and the Church
– Historical public debates
– Secularisation
– Church and State relations
– Freedom of religion
Ilkka Pyy (ilkka.pyy@uef.fi)
Enclosed lecture courses, my essential duty is a weekly research seminar in Human Geography, in which I supervise both Bachelors’ thesis and Masters’ thesis. For me, the fieldwork is also highly important geographical method of learning and that is why I have coordinated two decades a Nordic-Baltic network, which moderates intensive two-week course in a yearly basis. Course themes and venues varies according to ongoing research projects. My research deals with polity changes of the welfare state, core-periphery relations and rural/regional development policies as well as the politics of local involvement, service provision and environmental concern. Currently, my research focuses on the impacts of green and silver economies for urban and land use planning in urban and rural areas. Finally yet importantly, I act as tutor teacher for Masters’ degree Human Geography students and work in departmental group for developing teaching.
Iman Zarei (iman.zarei@uef.fi)
I completed my PhD in Human Nutrition, minor in Molecular Biology & Biotechnology at the University of the Philippines joined with Colorado State University, USA. My PhD research focused on identification of dietary biomarkers in cereal bran using metabolomics from two human intervention studies in adults and children and determination of cereal bran property in inhibiting bacterial pathogenicity in mouse cell line. As my cognate was Molecular Biology & Biotechnology, during my PhD program, I also worked over three years as lar at the Grain Quality and Nutrition Center as well as the Genetic Transformation Laboratory of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines, the most renowned rice research organization in the world. My work at IRRI included rice metabolomics, identification rice varieties with high protein content, and genetic modifications of rice for vitamin A (Golder Rice project) and iron and zinc bio-fortification. I currently work within the LongITools project (https://longitools.org) to study the effects physical activity and diet exposures on human health in determining the risks of chronic cardiovascular and metabolic diseases.
Isaac Afara (isaac.afara@uef.fi)
I am an Associate Professor with more than a decade of experience in applied and translational spectroscopy. My research interests range from applied spectroscopy, through multivariate and machine learning analysis in biospectroscopy, to computational biophotonics, all with the aim of bench-to-bedside translational of spectroscopy-based innovation for state-of-the-art optical characterization and diagnosis of biological tissue pathologies.
I currently lead the Biomedical Spectroscopy Lab (BSL, est. 2018), a multi-disciplinary team of Physicists and Engineers focused on applied spectroscopy and computational biophotonics research.
Jorma Palvimo (jorma.palvimo@uef.fi)
Our research builds on our firm expertise in the steroid signaling and transcriptional regulation and our pioneering work on the SUMOylation of transcription factors and chromatin. Our current major goals are to:
– Identify the chromatin-bound proteins associated with the androgen receptor (AR) and the glucocorticoid receptor (GR) and reveal the role of SUMOylation in these associations.
– Discover novel means to target the AR and GR in castration resistant prostate cancer.
– Reveal the chromatin targets and mechanisms by which SUMOylation regulates gene networks and chromatin structure in cellular plasticity.
To address these aims, we will use cutting-edge genome- and proteome-wide tools, including GRO-seq, ChIP-seq, ChIP-SICAP and Turbo-ID proximity labeling, with human prostate cancer cell lines, mesenchymal stem cells and reprogrammable somatic cells as our main model systems.
We anticipate that our systemic studies and studies will provide us with novel leads for targeting steroid receptors. We also believe that our innovative and systematic approaches with multitalented research collaboration will provide us with novel SUMOylation targets and significant discoveries of the mechanisms by which SUMOylation regulates cellular plasticity and homeostasis. The results are likely to have translational potential in regenerative medicine and drug discovery for diseases, such as cancer.