Kari
Vienola
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Biography
I'm currently doing research as Academy Research Fellow in University of Turku and acting as a university teacher in the Master’s Degree Programme in Biomedical Imaging. Prior to starting my teaching position in 2022, I obtained my MSc in Medical Physics and Medical Engineering in 2011 from the University of Turku. I then worked in the Rotterdam Ophthalmic Institute and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam for my dissertation, which I defended succesfully in January 2018. Afterwards I was a posdoctoral associate in University of Pittsburgh 2017-2019 in the lab of Dr. Ethan Rossi and postdoctoral scholar at University of California in Davis between 2019-2022 before arriving back to Finland.
Teaching
Currently most of my teaching is done at MSc level in the Biomedical Imaging programme, where I am responsible teacher in several courses, the main ones being fluorescence in bioanalytical research and physical basis of medical imaging. Besides these, I am also teaching radiation safety for medical and dentistry students.
I am also actively involved in the curriculum planning, implementation and development for the Biomedical Imaging programme, where I also act as a teacher tutor for the students. To support this, I have studied university pedagogy at the University of Turku over the past few years (25 ECTS) with the intent of obtaining full 60 ECTS within the next few years.
Research
My research focuses on development of new retinal imaging techniques and applying them to eyes with disease. Currently my efforts have been going into optoretinography, which is a new way to get functional measurements from the retina non-invasively. These functional responses, or optoretinograms, could be potentially used as a biomarker to detect early stages of disease when structural changes have not occured yet.
Another research interest is transforming existing imaging techniques to low-cost versions of themselves to spread the technology also to low- and middle income countries (LMICs).