Tarja Malm

Tarja Malm is Professor in Molecular Neurobiology and the head of the Neuroinflammation research group at the A.I. Virtanen Institute, University of Eastern Finland. She is also the head of the “In vitro and ex vivo electrophysiology core facility” belonging to the Biocenter Kuopio and Biocenter Finland. She obtained her PhD in 2006 in Neurobiology with the focus glial cell biology and carried out her postdoctoral training at the Case Western Reserve University, USA. Her research focuses on understanding microglia-neuron signalling. Her group uses interdisciplinary approaches and develops novel, human based models to find therapeutic strategies to combat brain diseases. Her research group has pioneered development of methodologies to differentiate microglia and microglia containing cerebral organoids from human induced pluripotent stem cells. In the past years, her research group has established methodologies to evaluate neuronal circuit functionalities from cortical biopsies obtained from patients of idiopathic normal pressure hydrocephalus (iNPH) offering a novel source to study AD-related events at the molecular, functional and structural level.