Principal Investigator Kirsi Pietiläinen is trained as an MD (specialist in Internal Medicine), PhD, and MSc in Nutrition. She was awarded tenure, thereby becoming Professor of Clinical Metabolism in January 2017 at the University of Helsinki, Faculty of Medicine.
Kirsi is passionate about the study of obesity, its pathophysiology and novel treatments. Her research is a joint effort of her two teams at the Obesity Research Unit (University of Helsinki) and the Obesity Centre (Helsinki University Hospital). Her lab was part of the Centre of Excellence for Research on Mitochondria, Metabolism and Disease of the Academy of Finland, Finmit, in 2014-2019, which serves as a foundation for her group’s research within the field of mitochondria.
As an MD, Kirsi aims to improve obesity treatment in Finland by delivering continuing education courses, by chairing the Clinical Guidelines for Management of Obesity, and most recently by spearheading a new web-based obesity treatment program
Kirsi’s dedication to obesity research is also evident through numerous engagements in international collaborations and advisory boards.
Sini Heinonen is a Co-Principal Investigator of the Obesity Research Unit and Adjunct Professor (Docent) in Experimental Internal Medicine. She is a physician-scientist (MD, PhD) and a resident in Internal Medicine, and leads the AdipoMito Metabolism Lab:
Her research focuses on identifying adipose tissue– and peripheral tissue–derived mechanisms that drive metabolic dysfunction and insulin resistance in human obesity. Using deeply phenotyped clinical cohorts, tissue multi-omics, and translational experimental approaches, her work aims to uncover molecular pathways that could be targeted to improve long-term metabolic health. Current projects investigate how gut hormones, metabolites, and bile acids regulate adipose tissue mitochondrial function and systemic metabolism.
Dissertation:
Hanna Haltia (MD) is a doctoral researcher aiming to understand how individual characteristics, such as sex and postprandial GLP-1 response, shape the biology of adipose tissue in obesity and contribute to metabolic health. Since writing her award-winning medical thesis about RNA interference methodology in differentiated preadipocytes, she has explored big-data analysis methods spanning various types of omics. Hanna is also very interested in the development of new obesity treatments, and she has worked in various clinical medication trials.
View Hanna’s MD thesis:
Elena Herbers is a passionate PhD student about cell biology and metabolism. The main topic of Elena's research is to study mitochondrial functions in adipocytes and role of mitochondria in obesity and metabolic complications development. Do obese people have “lazy” mitochondria? Can we find a way to activate mitochondria in fat tissue? She is trying to answer these questions by working with cells and using various molecular biology techniques.
Birgitta van der Kolk is a metabolic researcher investigating the molecular mechanisms linking obesity to cardiometabolic disease and insulin resistance. She studies adipose tissue and skeletal muscle metabolism, lipid handling, and mitochondrial function using detailed metabolic phenotyping, human intervention studies, and multi-omics approaches. Her work with body weight-discordant twin pairs and various weight loss interventions (lifestyle, surgery, medications) aims to uncover the biological drivers of metabolic differences and the mechanisms underlying obesity, weight loss, and metabolic health.
Mahes Muniandy is a post-doctoral researcher who specializes in bioinformatics analysis of OMICS data. Her research in the field of obesity and weight loss focuses on statistical modelling of relationships between molecular-level data and obesity phenotypes. A considerable part of her research work involves scripting and statistical analysis using R; she is happiest when her research results reveal or confirm the biology of obesity and its related co-morbidities. Before starting her career in research, she worked for many years in telecommunications and, as a result, maintains a nostalgic interest in technology.
Sakris Kupila is an MD PhD student in Obesity Research Unit.
Helena Lapatto's PhD project concentrates on studying how obesity is related to the NAD+/Sirtuin metabolism. Surprisingly little is known about the sirtuin-related gene expression changes in human obesity, especially in the adipose tissue and adipocytes. The individual studies focus on different perspectives, ranging from epigenetics to therapy. Her research goal is to gain insight to the interaction between the cellular and clinical phenotype.
Aila Ahola's (Docent, PhD) research focuses on the data collected from the Healthy Weight Coaching program, a 12-month digital lifestyle intervention. I investigate how factors such as loneliness, multimorbidity, pain, and physical activity relate to weight loss outcomes and health related quality of life. I am also interested in participants’ causal attributions for obesity and weight loss, and how these beliefs shape their success in the program. Overall, my work aims to identify user characteristics and behavioral patterns that support effective long term weight management in digital health interventions.
Research assistant (BSc in Molecular biosciences)
Biomedical Laboratory Scientist
Postdoctoral researcher Sina Saari's research interests lie in better understanding the metabolic role and regulation of mitochondria, and particularly in how the balance between the respiratory chain and the tricarboxylic acid cycle reflects on the metabolic state of the cell, tissues and eventually, the whole organism.