Research Unit of Population Health

The Research unit of Population Health aims at research excellence in the fields of life-course epidemiology, systems epidemiology, psychiatric epidemiology, occupational health, health activity, public health, environmental health as well as oral health and clinical practices.

Lifelong health is the cross cutting theme of our research.  We view human health from the perspective of different disciplines from individual to global scale - from oral health to general practice and public health to environmental and planetary health. One important aspect is the use of high technology in maintaining and promoting oral health. Our multidisciplinary research groups host researchers with different backgrounds and expertise, from clinical researchers to gene researchers, health scientists to geographers, biologists and anthropologists.

The researchers are supported by international and national funding including Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe projects (EUCAN CONNECT, LongITools, EarlyCause, TRIGGER, EMERGE, InChildHealth),  the Academy of Finland (APSY Oulu, RECIPE, SCHOOLWELL and Academy Research Fellows), Biocenter Oulu and several foundations.

You can find more information about the research groups and the projects from the links below.

Research Unit of Population Health is responsible of education for general medicine, geriatrics, occupational health, dentistry and public health. Our international research unit trains young researchers at different career stages in the master's and doctoral phase and in the post-doctoral phase. Many of our researchers teach epidemiology, molecular epidemiology and biomedical data science in the Epidemiology and Biomedical Data Science (EBDS) Master's Programme. Our unit is active in developing and implementing evidence-based practices, which also includes performing administrative tasks in the healthcare sector and developing specialist medical training at both local and national level. As an example, we implement two-year General Medicine GP training, which is in-depth training in the core competence areas of general medicine, in cooperation with the Unit of General Medicine at the Wellbeing Services County of North Ostrobothnia. Our unit bears the main responsibility for basic dental education and special education and basic medical education regarding multi-morbidity, multi-problems, functional capacity and health services.