About Me

My key persons in Umeå have been Janne Ylärinne, Juha Prittinen, Juha Piltti and Chengjuan Qu

I first got involved with cartilage proteoglycans when I chose to start my Master's thesis in 1985 under supervision by professor Markku Tammi in the Department of Anatomy at the University of Kuopio. During that period I got so stuck with the topic that I continued in 1987 to complete my PhD in 1993 on topic of in vitro and in vivo loading of cartilage and chondrocytes.

I did my post-doc at the Department of Experimental Medicine of University of Erlangen-Nürnberg in professor Klaus von der Mark's research group sequencing the intron sequences of human type X collagen gene and investigating its regulatory elements.

Returning back to the Department of Anatomy in Kuopio my focus turned into investigations on the effects of hydrostatic pressure on chondrocytes, cartilage repair using poly-lactic acid and recombinant human type II collagen biomaterials.

Collaborations with the physicists in Kuopio introduced me also to biomechanics and cartilage and bone imaging. All in all, these projects have involved a truely multidisciplinary working teams, which has made these research projects so interesting.

In Germany I also got a new friend professor Xiong Guo, who introduced me to Chinese endemic illness called Kashin-Beck disease. Our common efforts to understand its pathology has then expanded, in particular thanks to my part-time recruitment to Xi'an Jiaotong University starting the year 2015, and the collaboration still goes on strongly.

More detailed information is available in the links added below. My present and previous projects and supervised thesis are described in the relevant sections of this web site.