Academic Degrees
- MD, University of Eastern Finland
- PhD Public Health
- Docent in Public Health
Clinical Trial Experience
Participation in the phase I-IV of several clinical drug trials (over 60) on Alzheimer’s disease, mild cognitive impairment, stroke, obesity, hypertension, dyslipidemia, and metabolic syndrome as investigator/principal investigator since 2000.
Major Research and Clinical Interests
- Epidemiology, prevention, diagnostics and therapy of Alzheimer’s disease Aging
- Biomarkers, epidemiology, diagnostics and therapy for cardiovascular diseases.
- Heart brain connection in various
Susanna Iivonen is a University Lecturer (Physical Education) in School of Applied Educational Science and Teacher Education. Teaching: Physical education in early childhood education teacher education, supervision of theses. Research areas: Physical education pedagogy in early childhood education, children’s motor skills, physical activity and outdoor play, physical education in early childhood education teacher education.
I work at the UEF in Faculty of Social Sciences and Business Studies Doctoral Programmes and the Sustainable Wellbeing Research Group as a part-time PhD researcher. The other half of my work is as a preventive work coordinator in the Päijät-Häme wellbeing services county. My expertise is related to preventive work (substance abuse, mental health, digital gaming and gambling, intimate partner violence), networks and social pedagogy. My research explores the effectiveness of prevention work as a systemic and complex whole. I also work as a social care specialist in the Substance abuse, Mental Health and Pain section of the Service Choices in healthcare (palveluvalikoima.fi) from summer 2024.
I focus my research and teaching on digital pedagogy as well as students’ reading enjoyment and motivation. Recently, my interest has expanded to the pedagogical design and application of AI agents in both basic education and university teaching. I am actively involved in developing teacher education and work in close collaboration with the teachers of the University of Eastern Finland’s teacher training school in Joensuu. I also supervise bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral theses.
I am a doctoral researcher in social work at the Department of Social Sciences. In my doctoral research, I examine out-of-home care and young people’s experiences of life in care. The aim of my research is to develop a deeper understanding of everyday life in out-of-home care from the perspective of young people. I am particularly interested in research methods that enable an in-depth exploration of lived experience and bring forward the voices of young people.
Teaching Reflection; reflection prompts; metacognition; academic emotions; qualitative methods; advising for bachelor’s thesis Research My research focuses on key themes of reflection, reflection prompts, metacognition and academic emotions. In my doctoral research, I examine how students’ reflection can be supported and made visible in comprehensive school mathematics. I am particularly interested in what pedagogical practices reveal about students’ thinking and emotions — and what students’ reflections, in turn, tell us about the practices used. The aim of my research is to generate practice-oriented knowledge that helps to understand what is important to consider when supporting reflection with school-aged learners in a subject-specific context. Some of my earlier publications are published under the surname Toikka.
Suvi Linna-Kuosmanen is a Senior Researcher at the A.I. Virtanen Institute and a Principal Investigator and Group Leader of Linna Lab. The lab was established in October 2023 and is currently located at the University of Eastern Finland. Linna-Kuosmanen uses single-cell and spatial omics, data integration, and machine learning / AI models to identify novel drug targets and biomarkers for clinical applications and more personalized medicine. Her ongoing work combines unique human patient samples and engineered human tissue models with state-of-the-art experimental and computational methods, to elucidate disease mechanisms of major aging-related chronic diseases, as well as aging itself, with special emphasis on coronary artery disease, heart failure, and atrial fibrillation. In addition to mapping molecular changes in clinical samples, she investigates the effects of environmental exposures, such as micro- and nanoplastics, in the cardiac cell and tissue environments to estimate their impact on disease manifestation and progression. Prior to her current position, Linna-Kuosmanen trained as a postdoctoral researcher mapping cardiovascular disease-associated changes in the cells of ex vivo human heart samples, and establishing high-resolution maps of microvasculature in these clinical samples at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) of MIT and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Cambridge, USA. She received her PhD in Molecular Medicine at the University of Eastern Finland, Kuopio, Finland, where she examined the disease mechanisms and putative biomarkers of atherosclerosis through cardiovascular genomics. Linna-Kuosmanen holds a Masters degree in Biochemistry from the University of Kuopio, Finland, and studied Neuroscience in honours program at the University of Glasgow during her Bachelors stage.
