The Academy of Finland’s Research Council for Natural Sciences and Engineering announced today 22 new Academy Research Fellow posts, one of them at the University of Eastern Finland. Baran Aydogan, Research Director of the A.I. Virtanen Institute at the University of Eastern Finland, secured 447, 650 euros of funding for a five-year period. In addition, the Research Council granted funding to three Academy Postdoctoral Researchers at the UEF, Morteza Ghahremani Boozandani, Mohamed Abdelgalil, and Mithilesh Prakash.
Aydogan received funding for a project to develop better treatment for depression. Major depression disorder is the third leading cause of disability worldwide, and one out of fifteen people in the developed world suffer from it. Unfortunately, half of these people do not respond to antidepressants. There is therefore an urgent need for effective and well-tolerated alternative treatments for depression.
Aydogan’s research project focuses on one such promising technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), which has been used in hospitals for several years. The efficacy of TMS is, however, currently limited. The goal of project is to develop TMS into a highly effective depression treatment approach. To achieve this, researchers will make personalized treatment plans using new magnetic resonance imaging techniques, which will be developed in this project. Project can lead to a breakthrough in depression treatment.
For the Academy Postdoctoral Researcher projects, Morteza Ghahremani Boozandani received funding of 211, 850 euroa, Mohamed Abdelgalil 231, 600 euroa, and Mithilesh Prakash 235,120 euros.
Ghahremani Boozandan’s project focuses on self-supervised image registration and integration of 3D multimodal imaging. Abdelgalil’s project is called TOPEILA, “Towards precision education: Idiographic learning analytics”. Prakash’s project, NeuroSynth, focuses on simulation of multimodal, longitudinal datasets enabling neurodegeneration tracking.
News release source: Academy of Finland, https://www.aka.fi/en/about-us/whats-new/press-releases/2022/academy-of-finland-grants-academy-research-fellow-funding-to-highly-rated-researchers-in-natural-sciences-and-engineering/
