People

About me

I am the group leader of the Systems Biology of Aging research group at the Faculty of Medicine and Health Technology, Tampere University. My research group studies biological aging  — how to measure it, what drives it, and how it’s linked to adverse outcomes, such as age-related diseases and mortality. We use genetic, multiomics and AI approaches and causal inference methods to unravel why some people age in good health while others become frail and dependent on assistance earlier in life. Another aim and ongoing project in our group is to develop an electronic frailty index for healthcare – a tool to measure whole-organism aging and identify vulnerable individuals at early stages.

About me

Jake is a senior research fellow in the Systems Biology for Aging as well as the Biostatistics group. 
His research focus includes in multivariate genome-wide association testing, statistical and machine learning towards omics integration to investigate genetic and environmental factors driving frailty, autism and T1D.  He contributes to the following projects: FinnGen, GEMMA and DIPP/TEDDY. 
After receiving his PhD (Bioinformatics) in 2018 from Tampere University, he worked for 4 years in Statistical Genetics, FIMM, University of Helsinki where he focused on development and application of multivariate genome-wide models and received a 3-year Postdoctoral researcher grant from the Research Council of Finland in 2019. His work has both focused on method implementation for omics data and analysis.

Responsibilities

AI-NLP processing for EFI construction and modeling

Omics integration for GEMMA

Multivariate GWAS

 

Research topics

ASD, T1D, Frailty

Population genetics

Omics integration

Machine learning and AI 

About me

Parinaz Poursafa is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Tampere Institute for Advanced Study for the period 2025–2027. She is currently working in the Systems Biology of Aging research group in the Faculty of Medicine and Health Technology at Tampere University.

With over a decade of research experience in environmental health sciences and environmental epidemiology, she specializes in investigating how air pollution and other environmental exposures affect human health. Her current research focuses on the emerging role of environmental exposures as novel risk factors in biological aging, integrating environmental and biological data to uncover mechanisms underlying accelerated aging.

She is broadly interested in understanding the role of environmental exposures in health across the lifespan, contributing to a deeper understanding of the mechanisms through which the environment shapes health and disease.

 

 

Research topics

#EnvironmentalHealth #EnvironmentalEpidemiology #AirPollution #BiologicalAging