Vuoksimaa Group
Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland (FIMM)
P.O. Box 20, 00014 University of Helsinki, Finland
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.
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.