At the Center for Life Course Health Research (CLCHR), our research groups aim at research excellence in the fields of life-course epidemiology, systems epidemiology, musculoskeletal epidemiology and clinical practice, psychiatric epidemiology, as well as occupational and public health.
We want to understand and model the trajectories to health and healthy lifestyle as well as ill health and co-morbidities through and at different times during the life-course to (1) gain precision in identifying the genetic, epigenetic and metabolic factors (2) characterize the role of environmental and other factors and (3) comprehend the social and societal dimensions of health, healthy lifestyle and co-morbidities and also (4) define co-morbidities between chronic diseases and (5) to enable supporting functional capacity.
The researchers at CLCHR are supported by international and national funding including Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe projects (LifeCycle, EUCAN CONNECT, LongITools, EarlyCause, EdCmet, TIGGER), the Academy of Finland (APSY Oulu, Profi 6 FibrObesity, STN, RECIPE, Postdoctoral Researcher funding), Ministry of Education and Culture (SEPAS, Acticard), the Biocenter Oulu and other foundations e.g Yrjö Jahnsson Foundation (DEPRISK).
Our international research unit educates young researchers at different career stages at the master’s level, doctoral degree level and post-doctoral level. Many of our researchers teach epidemiology, molecular epidemiology, and biomedical data science in the master’s programme in Epidemiology and Biomedical Data Science (EBDS). Our unit is actively creating social impact by developing and implementing evidence-based practices in the health care sector, through holding positions in administrative organizations and by developing postgraduate medical specialist education both at local and national level. Among these, the two-year General Practice education provides an in-depth training for core areas in general medicine and is implemented together with the Unit of Primary Health Care, at Oulu University Hospital. Importantly, our unit carries the main responsibility in the research-based basic medical education concerning co-morbidities, multi-morbidities, multiple problems, functional capacity, and health service systems.
