Mariella Särestöniemi named among Finland’s 50 leading women in technology

Mariella Särestöniemi, a docent and university researcher at the University of Oulu, has been named on Tivi magazine’s list of the 50 leading women in technology in Finland. The magazine also interviewed her for the feature.

“I am truly honored to be named among the 50 leading women in technology in Finland, and to have been selected as one of the interviewees,” Särestöniemi wrote on LinkedIn.

She works across two units at the university, the Health Sciences and Technology group in the Faculty of Medicine and the Centre for Wireless Communications in the Faculty of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering. She came to engineering partly by chance, she says, after missing a place at medical school on her first attempt. A planned year of electrical engineering turned into a career once her interest in the meeting point of technology and health took hold during doctoral work on how radio signals travel through body tissue.

Her research now focuses on portable and wearable health monitoring. Her group builds digital and physical “twins” of the human body, tissue and body models that let researchers test how a device performs in conditions close to real medical use, from the earliest stage of development.

The wider aim is to move monitoring and early diagnostics beyond hospital walls, into homes, smaller health centres and mobile units. Särestöniemi sees this as a way to even out access to care between regions, and as support during emergencies when hospital infrastructure is damaged.

One example from her group is a microwave-based vest for monitoring breast health. It could allow checks far more often than current screening programmes, and reach younger people who fall outside them. Early measurements with a first prototype have given indications that the vest can detect small tumours regardless of breast density. The work remains at an early stage.