Research interests: nervous system structure and function, cell fate acquisition during development, cellular diversity in the nervous system.
Kaia has studied transgenic technologies, developmental biology and neuroscience. She completed PhD in Physiology and Neuroscience in the University of Helsinki at 2010, followed by postdoctoral research in evolutionary developmental biology in EMBL Heidelberg, Germany and and computational biology in EMBL-EBI in UK. She established the Interneuron Development research group in the University of Helsinki at 2018.
Senior Researcher
Sami has an interdisciplinary research background, spanning from the natural , biomedical and medical sciences to informatics. He has master’s degree from biological sciences with additional studies in other natural sciences, and a long lasting interest in both learning and teaching bioinformatics. Sami completed PhD degree in Helsinki University Medical faculty at 2010. The PhD thesis research focused on integrative studies of human transcriptome across hundreds of healthy and malignant human tissues, and also led to formation of bioinformatics company MediSapiens Ltd. Before joining the Interneuron Development lab, Sami led the MediSapiens company for 10 years, first as CSO and then CEO.
Currently, after the 10 years of industry post-doc period in heavily applied bioinformatics, he has shifted interest towards basic research in biological sciences and is filling our ever growing need of data analytics. His current work involves computational integration of multiple single-cell sequencing datatypes to model transcriptional regulation of neuronal development.