Vuoksimaa Group
Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland (FIMM)
P.O. Box 20, 00014 University of Helsinki, Finland
Eero Vuoksimaa is an Academy of Finland Research Fellow and Docent in Neuropsychology. He received PhD in Psychology in 2010 from the University of Helsinki. From doctoral studies to senior researcher position, Vuoksimaa has been part of the Finnish Twin Cohort (FTC) led by Jaakko Kaprio. Vuoksimaa was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, San Diego in 2012-2013 focusing on behavior genetics of brain and cognition in the Vietnam Era Twin Study of Aging group led by Carol Franz and William Kremen. Vuoksimaa started independent career in September 2018 as a FIMM group leader. With his longstanding interest in neuropsychology he is now focusing in cognitive aging.
Aino Aaltonen completed her bachelor’s degree in mathematics and master’s degree in psychology. She focused her studies on neuropsychology and is interested in various neurological disorders, memory, executive functions, and aging. She joined Vuoksimaa’s group in 2023 to work on the TWINGEN project. Her dissertation focuses on the early identification of Alzheimer’s disease, particularly examining episodic memory and mild cognitive impairment in relation to blood-based biomarkers and genetics.
Paula Iso-Markku is a medical doctor, and graduated from the University of Eastern Finland in 2012. She defended her thesis about the relationships of physical activity, cognition, and dementia mortality in Finnish twins in 2019. She is also working on her specialization in clinical physiology and nuclear medicine. Her post doc project is about the relatioship of cardiovascular risk factors and cognition in Finnish twins.
Toni Saari is a psychologist who joined the Vuoksimaa Group in 2023 as a postdoc. He completed his PhD at the University of Eastern Finland, focusing on neuropsychiatric symptoms in Alzheimer’s disease. He is working with the TWINGEN study and is particularly interested in the role of neuropsychiatric symptoms in the early stages and at-risk states of dementia.
Claudia Schwarz is a neuroscientist and joined as a postdoc in the Vuoksimaa Group in April 2021. Her background is in biology, but during her master studies in neuroscience she became increasingly interested in human research using multimodal neuroimaging. Her PhD research at the Charité - University Hospital Berlin, Germany, focused on dietary interventions to promote healthy brain aging in individuals at risk for Alzheimer's disease. Claudia is particularly fascinated by the transition from healthy to pathological brain aging and the identification of risk and protective factors, which represent an interesting approach for potential early intervention strategies to preserve cognitive function and brain health into old age. At FIMM, she will be working with longitudinal data from ongoing twin studies to further advance our understanding of cognitive and brain aging.
I am a Doctoral student at the Helsinki Institute of life science. My long way to FIMM student started in Moscow, where I have got my bachelor’s degree in biology in Russian State Agrarian University and a master’s degree in bioinformatics in High School of Economics. The combination of biology and data science seems to me the most fascinating direction in science at the moment.
My previous researches had quite a wide spectrum of interests, from exploring the Bovine leukemia virus resistance in cattle to an analysis of alternative splicing in African non-biting midges, Polypedilum vanderplanki. Currently, I am interested in neuroscience research combining image processing, deep learning and epigenetic analysis.
In my free time, I'm practicing meditation, learning to play the ukulele, drawing by watercolor, spending time in nature, meeting new people, and opening for myself new activities.
Mia Urjansson, medical laboratory technologist, has been working as a Clinical Research Nurse in the Vuoksimaa Group since 2019. Her current work in the group is project coordinating, assisting in planning the new studies and ethical applications. She has the main responsibility of all contacts with study subjects, coordinating new study visits and interviews, data handling and returning the results for the subjects.
Anni Varjonen is working as a doctoral student in Vuoksimaa’s cognitive and brain aging group. She completed her bachelor’s degree at Robert Morris University (USA) in Clinical Psychology, after which she continued to complete her master’s degree in Human Neuroscience at the University of Turku. Anni's dissertation project focuses on risk and protective factors and cortical structures associated with dementia and Alzheimer's disease. Her research utilizes twin design and the population based Finnish Twin Cohort.