Our research activities
- FinnBrain Birth Cohort study was launched at the University of Turku in 2010, and its purpose is to study the combined influence of environmental and genetic factors on child development and later health outcomes. It is an ongoing study and we take care of future data collections and are enthusiastically analysing the data that we have accumulated from prenatal period over the first five years of life.
- The Centre of Excellence for Learning Dynamics and Intervention Research (InterLearn) investigates the links between children’s learning and mental health, and the factors that explain the effectiveness of learning support interventions. We are part of InterLearn and we will be working with synergistic and partly harmonised data sets together with investigators from the University of Jyväskylä.
- Population neuroscience of the neural correlates of obesity and future obesity risk in (pre)adolescents is one the more recent research initiatives for us: it “endeavours to identify environmental and genetic factors that shape the function and structure of the human brain; it uses tools and knowledge of genetics, epidemiology, and cognitive neuroscience.” We use data from the ABCD Study to enable these studies and have also extended many of the brain network modelling approaches to infant MRI data stemming from the developing Human Connectome Project.
- Lifespan neuroscience is a new initiative that has just started. I have joined the Lifespan consortium in creation of brain growth charts for additional neuroimaging measures to accompany the volumetric growth charts that were recently created.
International collaboration (selection)
- Brain network modelling (connectomics), Morten Kringelbach (Oxford, UK)
- Developing Human Connectome Project, David Edwards (KCL, London, UK)
- Lifespan consortium, Richard Bethlehem (Cambridge, UK)
- UCI cohort, Claudia Buss, Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Germany
- UCI cohort, Jerod Rasmussen, University of California, Irvine (US)