Prasanthi Medarametla ([email protected])
Prasanthi Medarametla is an Academy Research Fellow at the School of Pharmacy, University of Eastern Finland. She obtained her Bachelor’s degree in Pharmaceutical Sciences and a Master’s degree in Pharmacoinformatics from NIPER, India. She then worked as a Project Associate and TATA–CSIR–OSDD Fellow at the Indian Institute of Chemical Technology, Hyderabad.
Prasanthi was a Marie Skłodowska‑Curie Early Stage Researcher in the EU‑MSCA ITN project INTEGRATE (Interdisciplinary Training Network for Validation of Gram‑Negative Antibacterial Targets). She completed her PhD at the University of Eastern Finland, Kuopio, in 2020, where she focused on computational screening of novel antibacterials within the INTEGRATE project.
In 2022, she joined the University of Cambridge as a Postdoctoral Researcher with support from the Postdoc Pooli (Jenny and Antti Wihuri Foundation), gaining expertise in experimental microbiology and structural biology techniques, including cryo‑EM and X‑ray crystallography. She later returned to UEF and worked as a Senior Researcher in the Biopharmacy Department before receiving an Academy Research Fellow position in 2025.
Currently, she leads the AVID (Anti‑Virulence Drug Discovery) research group at UEF and serves as the leader of the NORDFORSK NORD‑AViD consortium.
If you’re interested in Master’s projects or planning to pursue a PhD related to antibacterial protein targets and the mechanisms underlying bacterial virulence, feel free to reach out—I’d be happy to discuss potential opportunities.
Primary Health Care Research, Development, Innovation and Education and Health Hub: Building Academic Health Center and Promoting Real-Word Effectiveness in Eastern Finland Collaborative Area
Project Researcher
Päivi Atjonen ([email protected])
During my academic career, I have been interested in curriculum development of comprehensive schools, pedagogical use of ICT and pedagogical ethics. The most recent 20 years I focused on research on assessment and evaluation with the special interest in developmental evaluation. My research topics were assessment and evaluation of learning. I have worked also as an active in-service educator of my research topic. I have retired 1.1.2024 (Professor, emerita) but work on some academic tasks related to evaluation and assessment based on my own interest (doctoral education excluded).
Päivi Eriksson ([email protected])
I study and teach topics related to organizations and management, innovation and renewal, collaborative research and societal impact of research, academic entrepreneurship, and qualitative methods. I co-lead the Innovation Management research group together with Hanna Lehtimäki. Together with Tero Montonen, I lead the Neuro-innovation and impact research team that works in the multidisciplinary neuroscience research community at UEF (NEURO). I also work as the Coordinator of the MSCA Horizon 2020 Neuro-Innovation PhD programme (2021-2027) and as the Co-coordinator of the MSCA Horizon Europe NOVEL postdoctoral programme (2024-2029).
Päivi Pihlaja ([email protected])
I work in the Department of Applied Education and Teacher Education at the University of Eastern Finland as a Professor of Education and my special field is early childhood education. I have been a teacher trainer for over 20 years and have trained, among other things, special education teachers for basic education and teachers for early childhood education. My research activities have focused on special education and early childhood education, as well as their combined surface, i.e. early childhood special education. My research interests are, children’s social and emotional development and learning difficulties, toddler pedagogy, inclusion with its many dimensions, and educational policy themes such as privatization and early childhood education policy. Methodologically, I am oriented towards qualitative research and my quantitative research has been relatively limited. The research projects I have been on charge include Research Consortium for Vakaata Tukea – Effective Support for Early Childhood Education Reform (funding period 2023-2025); the support system and administrative processes in ECE funding period (2022- 2023), Toddler research (funding period 2018- 2020), Development of information technology and early childhood education (together with Professor Hannu Salmela (University of Turku) (2006 2009), Socio-emotional difficulties and day care (2005 – 2006). I am also part of a multidisciplinary, longitudinal study the Steps-study (Steps to the Healthy Development and Well-being of Children) which began in 2007 in the University of Turku. You find some of these projects on this site.
Päivi Rosenius ([email protected])
I am a University Teacher in Career Guidance and Counselling. My expertise focuses on guidance pedagogy, dialogical and participatory learning, and the design and development of student-centred teaching.
My teaching emphasises students’ active agency, collaborative learning, interaction, and shared expertise. I create learning environments where students can participate, ask questions, engage in discussion, experiment, and build understanding together. I also see the teacher as a learner: in dialogical pedagogy, knowledge and expertise are constructed collaboratively.
I develop teaching based on research and student feedback. I am particularly interested in how different pedagogical approaches, digital learning environments, and the opportunities offered by technology can support learning, participation, meaningful encounters, and flexible ways of learning. A supportive, dialogical, and inquiry-based approach is at the heart of my teaching and pedagogical development work.
Radiation Research Group (RARE)
Rafael Lopes Almeida ([email protected])
I studied Electrical Engineering as an undergraduate and got drawn into machine learning along the way. After graduating, I spent a few years in industry, working as a Computer Vision Engineer, Data Scientist, and AI Engineer. I worked on license plate recognition, fraud detection, NLP systems, and predictive toxicology.
For my Master’s degree I built machine learning models for QSAR (Quantitative Structure-Activity Relationship) applications in pharmaceutical research. That work pulled me into cheminformatics and, more broadly, into thinking about how AI methods can be useful in drug discovery. I have also been involved as a P&D Researcher in industry and as a Research Collaborator at the Computational Intelligence Laboratory (LITC), where the focus has been on developing machine learning approaches with practical applications in cheminformatics.
At UEF, my research sits at the intersection of AI and drug discovery. I work with graph-based molecular representations and graph neural networks (GNNs), and I’m particularly interested in model explainability, that is, understanding why a model makes a given prediction, not just whether it gets the right answer. I also develop machine learning and deep learning methods aimed at improving predictive models for pharmaceutical research, with a focus on data-intensive problems in drug discovery pipelines.