Ahmed Hussein ([email protected])
Aleksander Osipov ([email protected])
Alexander Osipov is a postdoctoral fellow at the Karelian Institute, the University of Eastern Finland. He received his diploma in history (2002) and Candidate of Sciences degree (2006) from Petrozavodsk State University, Russia. He completed his PhD at the University of Eastern Finland in 2022.
His research interests have ranged from the 19th century Finnish migration and the Russian Civil War to post-Soviet decolonization and environmental history. He is presently examining state-building processes and strategies in the post-Soviet space from an environmental history perspective. His study explores the role of natural landscapes in state-building in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.
Andrew Agbaje ([email protected])
Prof. Agbaje is an award-winning physician and professor (associate) of clinical epidemiology and child health who investigates the causal relationships of aerobic fitness, physical activity, sedentary behaviour, obesity, insulin resistance, dyslipidaemia, and metabolic syndrome with arterial, cardiac, liver, and kidney structure and function from childhood through young adulthood.
Prof. Agbaje is the world’s 3rd highest ranked scholar, 2nd best in Europe and best in the Nordics in arterial stiffness specialty according to ScholarGPS 2025 global ranking.
Research group Website https://urfit-child.com
American Society of Nutrition Flemming Quaade Award Video Interview
Prof. Agbaje discovered childhood tobacco smoking as a cause of premature cardiac damage and identified that smoking prevalence increased 15 times between the age of 13 to 17 years. He also discovered arterial stiffness as a novel risk factor for paediatric obesity and insulin resistance, identified adolescence as the critical time to interrupt fat mass-insulin resistance pathologic cycle, and demonstrated light-intensity physical activity as a highly effective antidote for reversing excessive fat deposit induced by childhood sedentariness. Recently, he discovered waist-to-height ratio as a specific surrogate for fat mass but not muscle mass that could replace BMI in assessing childhood obesity. Subsequently, he was interviewed LIVE on BBC World News TV to discuss the novel findings.
In December 2024, the American Heart Association selected Prof Agbaje’s study as one of the world’s most significant advances in cardiovascular research in 2024. In October 2023, two of Prof. Agbaje’s publications were placed in the Top 1% highly cited paper in the academic field of Clinical Medicine, while a third publication was placed in the Top 1% highly cited paper in the academic field of Biology & Biochemistry by Clarivate’s Web of Science.
He has single/first-authored original papers in highly prestigious journals such as JACC, Diabetes Care, and Nature Communications. He was interviewed LIVE on BBC World Service Radio Newsday programme on 15th Dec 2023, BBC Radio Devon on 16th Jan 2024, and BBC World News LIVE TV programme on 14th March 2024. The University of Eastern Finland recorded a podcast interview of his findings as well as a video.
The Endocrine Society in US recorded a podcast interview of his research and discussed his research in the prestigious Endocrine Magazine March 2024 edition. He gave a press conference at the ENDO 2024 congress in Boston, US. He was interviewed by the European Association for the Study of Obesity, a federation of 36 European countries’ professional associations and subsequently had a video interview at the European Congress on Obesity.
His research has received extensive press coverage, with over 2,000 media mentions in 2022 and 2023 in outlets such as BBC, CNN, The Telegraph, Daily Mail, Mirror, BILD, Infobae, Yahoo Lifestyle, Yahoo Sport, US News & World report, DocCheck, MSN, WebMD, Medscape, The Conversation, Jerusalem Post, Helsingin Sanomat, YLE, etc, potentially reaching a global audience of more than 4.5 billion. The equivalent advertising value of these news articles is more than 30 million US dollars.
He is the principal investigator of the urFIT-child research group and has strong collaboration with world-renowned pediatricians, exercise physiologists, epidemiologists, and adult clinicians in Canada, US, UK, Germany, Australia, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, etc.
He received the prestigious inaugural American Society of Nutrition Foundation-Novo Nordisk Foundation Flemming Quaade Award for Innovative Approaches to Childhood Obesity with 500,000 Danish Kroner (€67,000 / 70,000 USD) prize. the 2024 EASO-NNF for New Investigator Award in Childhood Obesity with a 300,000 Danish Kroner (€40,000 / 44,000 USD) prize. Other awards are the Endocrine Society Award for outstanding abstract, American Heart Association’s Elizabeth Barrett-Connor Research Award in Epidemiology and Prevention (once), Jeremiah and Rose Stamler Research Award (twice), Early Career Investigator Award for Preventive Cardiovascular Medicine (Once), and Paul Dudley White International Scholar Award (four times).
He co-authored an American Heart Association Scientific Statement on Environmental Exposures and Pediatric Cardiology, published in Circulation. He had a video discussion of the Scientific Statement. He has given invited talks at the largest mother and child center in Canada – CHU Sainte-Justine Mother and Child University Hospital Center, Canada, European Society of Cardiology Congress, European Congress on Obesity, Endocrine Society Congress in the US, Artery Society Congress, etc.
He is an Honorary Research Fellow at the Children’s Health and Exercise Research Centre (CHERC), Faculty of Health and Life Sciences, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK.
He is an Associate Editor in the Journal of Cachexia, Sarcopenia, and Muscle (JCSM), serves on the editorial board of Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis, and Vascular Biology (ATVB), and mentors early career editorial board members. He also serves on the editorial board of Pediatric Exercise Science journal.
He is an elected Fellow of the American College of Cardiology (FACC), Fellow of the European Society of Cardiology (FESC), an elected Fellow of the American Heart Association (FAHA), an elected Fellow of the New York Academy of Medicine (FNYAM), and an elected member of Sigma Xi. These titles of honour, symbol of excellence and lifetime achievement recognizes his significant contribution to cardiovascular field in Europe and America.
He is an expert advisor to the World Health Organization and European Association for the Study of Obesity’s task force on preventing childhood obesity.
Primary email is [email protected]
Secondary email is [email protected]
Anna-Maija Tolppanen ([email protected])
I have multidisciplinary background (MSc in bioinformatics, PhD in genetic epidemiology and >15 years’ experience in different fields and application areas of epidemiology since completing my PhD. My current research focusses on pharmacoepidemiology and clinical epidemiology.
The overarching aim of my research is to develop and implement methods and approaches for evaluating effectiveness and safety of treatments by using real-world data. The applied data ranges from national register-based studies to multi- and single-center studies using data from electronic medical records and medical reports as well as data collected specifically for research purposes.
My group has produced internationally recognized real-world evidence on utilisation and outcomes of different treatments, compared and validated different patient-reported outcome measurements and determined clinically important threshold values for them, and evaluated health inequalities in neurodegenerative disorders.
My research has been funded by e.g Academy of Finland research fellowship, 3x grants from Michael J Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s research, work package leadership in Horizon-EU funded project Real4Reg https://www.real4reg.eu/ coordinated by the German Medicines Agency.
Annastiina Husso ([email protected])
Antti-Jussi Kouvo ([email protected])
I am a senior lecturer in the Department of Social Sciences at the University of Eastern Finland. My teaching focuses on research methods, especially statistical ones. My research focuses on well-being, social cohesion and social networks. I have studied the topics in the contexts of welfare states, neighbourhoods and the disadvantaged groups. For example, in our research project “The neighboring networks of the older city dwellers” we looked at the role of neighborhood networks for the well-being of older people and in our current project called SISU (funded by Research Council of Finland) I lead a work package that focuses on the role of institutional trust during the green transition.
Arindam Ghosh ([email protected])
I am a doctoral researcher within the Biomedical Informatics group led by Vittorio Fortino at the Institute of Biomedicine. My current research focusses on using network biology and machine learning towards improving drug efficacy and safety. I am also a part of the in silico work package of the EDCMET project where I support towards development of tools for understanding the mechanism of actions of endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs).
Aytac Yurukcu ([email protected])
Doctoral Researcher, working on recent research project:
“Imperial War, Collective Memories and National Identities in the Borderlands of Europe: Identity Formation among Peripheral Minorities during and after the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78”.
KM-19-11076 Finnish Government Scholarship Pool, EDUFI, “First Encounter of Two Nations in Balkans in the History of Relations between Finland and Turkey; Finnish Soldiers and War Reports During the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78”.
TM-21-11709 / Finnish Government Scholarship Pool, EDUFI, “War Propaganda and the Role of Media in Comparative Perspective: Analysing the Media Sources of the Russo-Turkish War 1877-78”.
My research interests include journalism, media, press, war correspondence, diaries and reminiscences late 19th and early 20th centuries in the Balkans and Eastern Europe. Also my research area specialises in identity and nationalism, historical image studies, intellectual history, cultural history, mapping and cartography. Currently, I am a reviewer for International Journal of Cartography ICACI/IJC and I am in the Editorial Board of The World History Bulletin (2020/2022), an official publication of the World History Association.
I wish to thank the following teachers and professors, who often went against the grain and got into trouble for that and dedicated a lot of their time to my learning and academic development, far beyond what their formal duties required. In order of their appearance in my life: Mustafa Gezer (Secondary School “Aliço School Koyunyeri”, Edirne), Docent Bülent Atalay (Trakya University, Department of History, Edirne), Prof. Hüseyin Mevsim (Ankara University, Faculty of Language, History and Georgraphy, Ankara), Prof. Jeremy Smith (University of Eastern Finland, Joensuu), Docent Teuvo Laitila (University of Eastern Finland, Joensuu).
Between the Normal and the Abnormal – Cultural Meanings of Dementia and Old Age in Finland and Russia (DemOldCult)
The study focuses on perceptions and representations of old age and dementia. The main aim of the research project is to make visible those cultural practices and discourses that produce marginalising stereotypes and stigmatise aging people, by means of deconstruction and critical approach. The examination of two cultural spheres, Finnish and Russian, both together and apart, will help in discovering and deconstructing cultural stereotypes.