Umair Khan defended his PhD thesis, “AI-driven image-to-image translation for histopathology”, at the University of Turku. Nataša Sladoje from Uppsala University acted as opponent, with Pekka as custos and supervisor and Leena Latonen as co-supervisor. It’s the first virtual-staining-focused PhD completed in Finland, congratulations Umair!
Author: Nisar Ahmed
Nisar joined the Bioimage Informatics Group on 5 March 2026 as a Senior Researcher and Marie Skłodowska-Curie (MSCA) Postdoctoral Fellow under the SYS-Life programme. He works on predictive modeling of cardiovascular diseases, combining spatial omics with computational histopathology. Welcome, Nisar!
Pekka and Masi contributed to a new bioRxiv preprint on how hypoxia and acidosis shape myeloid cell responses in glioblastoma, led by Kirsi Rautajoki’s team. The study combines cyclic immunohistochemistry, single-cell RNA sequencing, spatial transcriptomics and DNA methylation profiling across 136 glioblastomas, showing that infiltrating macrophages adapt to survive acidic hypoxic niches while microglia are depleted there and lose their homeostatic identity.