Events

May 22

HiLIFE webinar / Viikki Monday Seminar: Melissa Pespeni

Mechanisms of resilience and resistance in the sea: integrative inquires into surviving global change using marine invertebrates as models

Melissa Pespeni is an Associate Professor of Biology at the University of Vermont, Director of Quantitative and Evolutionary STEM Training (QuEST) PhD program, and recipient of the prestigious National Science Foundation CAREER Award. Dr. Pespeni is an evolutionary biologist whose work aims to understand how organisms adapt to current and future environmental conditions. She has published numerous articles in the leading journals of her field including Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Nature Communications, and Proceedings of the Royal Society, and has given several keynote seminars at premier, international conferences. As the Director of QuEST, Dr. Pespeni aims to shift the dialogue in higher education to focus on assets and strengths rather than deficits. Dr. Pespeni received her Ph.D. from the Department of Biology at Stanford University and a B.S. in Biology and B.A. in Critical Gender Studies from the University of California, San Diego. 

Pespeni research group 

PhD students and postdocs interested to join Melissa for lunch on Monday should email jukka-pekka.verta@helsinki.fi. Timeslots for meeting Melissa are available for Monday and Tuesday, please contact J-P in email above. 

 

Welcome to this exciting seminar!  

Jukka-Pekka Verta 

 

Selected publications: 

Brennan, R. S., deMayo, J. A., Dam, H. G., Finiguerra, M., Baumann, H., Buffalo, V., & Pespeni, M. H. (2022). Experimental evolution reveals the synergistic genomic mechanisms of adaptation to ocean warming and acidification in a marine copepod. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences119(38), e2201521119. 

 

Brennan, R. S., DeMayo, J. A., Dam, H. G., Finiguerra, M. B., Baumann, H., & Pespeni, M. H. (2022). Loss of transcriptional plasticity but sustained adaptive capacity after adaptation to global change conditions in a marine copepod. Nature communications13(1), 1-13. 

 

Lloyd, M. M., & Pespeni, M. H. (2018). Microbiome shifts with onset and progression of Sea Star Wasting Disease revealed through time course sampling. Scientific Reports8(1), 1-12. 





Start time: 22/05/2023 13:00
End time: 22/05/2023 14:00
Duration: 1 hour
Location: Biocenter 2, Lecture Hall 1041, Viikinkaari 5
Type: Seminar
Organization: Helsinki Institute of Life Science HiLIFE
Contact person: hilife-seminars@helsinki.fi
May 24

iCAN Science seminar: Nina Mars

​Impact of germline genetic factors in solid malignancies over the course of life
Welcome to the iCAN Science Seminar Impact of germline genetic factors in solid malignancies over the course of life  by Nina Mars, MD PhD (Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland (FIMM), HiLIFE, University of Helsinki, and Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard)
Genome-wide association studies have recently identified hundreds of common germline genetic factors impacting the risk of developing solid malignancies. The seminar will outline how this inherited common genetic variation influences risk of cancer over the course of life and how it could be used for risk prediction and personalised cancer screening, along with describing future avenues for using germline genetics for prediction of cancer prognosis. Nina Mars is a medical doctor and statistician working as a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland and at Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.


Start time: 24/05/2023 12:00
End time: 24/05/2023 13:00
Duration:
Location: Biomedicum 1, seminar room 1-2
Type: Seminar
Organization: iCAN Flagship Team
Contact person: ican@helsinki.fi
May 24

Biostatistics Workshop

Are you a researcher needing support with any statistical aspect of your work? The Biostatistics Consulting Service here at Meilahti Campus holds drop-in (N.B. registration required this week only!) workshop sessions every other week to answer smaller questions about your analysis - solving a particular problem, how to get started, etc. We provide service in Finnish, English and Swedish.

The next workshop - the last before summer, unless there is lots of demand - is on 
Wednesday 24th May, at 13:00-15:00 in Biomedicum 2B, in the Olohuone on floor 6. Come whenever you can. Note that you may end up waiting a while for your turn, especially early on in the session. We are currently short-staffed and will therefore have a strict 10-minute limit per customer. For longer questions, please consider a one-on-one consultation instead.

 

Bring: 

·       your computer

·       your data

·       your questions

and we biostatisticians will be on hand to help and guide. 

 

Unlike normal, registration is required this week by filling in this form. The workshops are open to any researcher at the university's Medical Faculty, HUS or FIMM.

If you would like the workshops to continue in June, let us know! No further sessions are currently planned until August, but we can organise 1 or 2 more sessions before the summer if we know there is sufficient demand.

For more in-depth questions, please book a one-on-one consultation session using this e-form where we will have time to go into more detail.  

From the Biostatistics Team

Start time: 24/05/2023 13:00
End time: 24/05/2023 14:00
Duration: 1 hour
Location: Biomedicum 2, 6th floor lounge
Type: Other
Organization: Biostatistics Consulting Service
Contact person: biostat-consult@helsinki.fi
May 24

Pharmacology seminars: Svetlana Molchanova

​Svetlana Molchanova, UH Neurobiology

Spontaneous activity of striosomal projection neurons supports maturation of striatal inputs to substantia nigra dopaminergic neurons

Start time: 24/05/2023 14:00
End time: 24/05/2023 14:45
Duration: 45 minutes
Location: Biomedicum 1, seminar room B201a
Type: Seminar
Organization: UH, Faculty of Medicine
Contact person:
May 25

6th FICAN seminar: Toni Seppälä

Molecular profiling and patient-derived cancer organoids – towards clinical applications
prof. Toni Seppälä

AbstractNovel tools to aid decision-making in challenging clinical decisions are required, and precision medicine holds great promise in delivering improvements to progressing cancers. Applications to steer oncological management have been largely based on genomic targeting of the drugs, but only less than third of patients benefit from genomically targeted approach, and the success is highly context-depending.


Functional precision oncology models such as patient-derived organoid technology enable individualized cell culture and personalized testing for each tumor. Organoids may serve as a clinical tool to guide traditional primary tumor NGS interpretation, and facilitate in vitro response
prediction to therapy. Data-intensive models for tumor microenvironment co-culture and combination pharmacotyping are needed.

Biography: Dr. Toni T. Seppälä graduated from medical school as licentiate of medicine in the University of Eastern Finland in 2010 and defended his PhD thesis on Alzheimer’s disease in
2012. During surgery residency with professor Jukka-Pekka Mecklin’s mentorship he became interested in cancer research.

He has worked as a colorectal surgeon since board certification in 2018, and was appointed as associate professor at Uni. Helsinki in 2019. In 2019–2021 Dr. Seppälä underwent a research fellowship at the department of Surgical Oncology in the Johns Hopkins University and Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center in Baltimore, MD, USA, under supervision of pancreatic surgeons Dr. Richard Burkhart and Dr. Christopher Wolfgang.

In 2022, he was appointed as a tenure track professor of cancer research in University of Tampere and leads laboratories and a research group in Tampere and Helsinki
Universities. He serves on the boards of Directors of the European Hereditary Tumour Group, International Society for Hereditary Gastroinstestinal Cancer, and the Finnish Society of
Surgery. He also has positions in the scientific committee of the Prospective Lynch Syndrome Database and several scientific advisory boards in societies and companies. 

Dr. Seppälä has published over 100 articles, opinions, podcasts and interviews with >3700 citations, and raised over 2.2M euros of competed research funding. The majority of Dr. Seppälä’s research have been from the field of hereditary cancer, colorectal cancer and pancreatic cancer, and he is appreciated as an expert especially in Lynch Syndrome. 

His current interests in cancer research are in personalized 
medicine utilizing precision technologies in solid tumors, such as genomics, patient-derived organoids and cell-free DNA.
Start time: 25/05/2023 15:00
End time: 25/05/2023 16:00
Duration:
Location: remotely
Type: Webinar
Organization: Finnish Cancer Center (FICAN)
Contact person: tuula.kallioinen@hus.fi