Health from Cohorts and Biobanks (COHORT) Seminar 16 December 2020

Health from Cohorts and Biobanks (COHORT) Academy Programme organizes the Closing Seminar of the Programme on Wednesday, 16 December 2020 at 12 noon. In the seminar, the research consortia funded in the Programme will represent their activities.

Finnish health promotion research has achieved a very high international standard in the past 15–20 years. A crucial asset has been its access to high-quality research datasets, including cohort data collected from different population groups, which have provided important evidence on the health effects of lifestyle factors. Coupled with frontline methods and excellent basic research, these data sources represent a major strength of Finnish health promotion research. The emergence of biobanks has opened the possibility to analyse detailed genetic and biological data at population level. Given the common genetic ancestry of the Finnish people, these data are extremely valuable and hold  great  international appeal because  they mean it is possible  to  study  multifactorial  traits  and  diseases  in  a genetically  homogeneous population.

The COHORT Academy Programme (2017-2020) provides funding for new kinds of researcher-driven projects that have both concrete short-term goals for research integration and longer-term goals that require commitment on the part of the host organisation and that will facilitate the continuity of integration. 

The Seminar will be held in English and is open to anyone interested in the subject.

The Youtube stream of the Seminar will be embedded on this event site.

Participants can place their questions through this Padlet link.

Programme:

12.00      Opening words (Mika Rämet, chair of the COHORT steering group)

12.10      Keynote 1 - Juni Palmgren, Dept of Medical Epidemiology and Biostatistics at Karolinska Institutet: On Health Data Research and Infrastructure

12.40      Andre Sourander, University of Turku: Finnish Psychiatric Birth Cohort Consortium (PSYCOHORTS)

13.00      Pekka Martikainen, University of Helsinki: Longitudinal birth cohort and family-based studies of morbidity, mortality and social disadvantage: a consortium application on sharing data, family designs and methods (BIRTHFAM)

13.20      break

13.40      Juha Pekkanen, University of Helsinki: Finnish Platform of Birth Cohorts: Microbial Interactions and Health (FINMIC)

14.00      Juulia Paavonen, Finnish institute for health and welfare: Sleep patterns in neuropsychological development in early childhood (Sleep in Development) 

14.20      Minna Ruddock (Männikkö), University of Oulu: Connecting Northern Finland Birth Cohorts with Borealis and THL Biobanks (CoCoBi)

14.40      break

15.00      Harri Niinikoski, University of Turku: Early determinants of cardiovascular, metabolic and reproductive health (EDCaR)

15.20      Keynote 2 - Johanna Seppänen, Findata: Findata, one-stop-shop for secondary use of social and health data

15.50      closing remarks