Events
HiLIFE webinar / Viikki Monday Seminar: Melissa Pespeni
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.
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!
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 Sciences, 119(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 communications, 13(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 Reports, 8(1), 1-12.
iCAN Science seminar: Nina Mars
Biostatistics Workshop
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
Pharmacology seminars: Svetlana Molchanova
Spontaneous activity of striosomal projection neurons supports maturation of striatal inputs to substantia nigra dopaminergic neurons
6th FICAN seminar: Toni Seppälä
prof. Toni Seppälä
Abstract: Novel 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
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.