Kirsi Laitinen MSc, PhD

Kirsi Laitinen is an associate professor at the University of Turku, Institute of Biomedicine, Research Centre for Integrative Physiology and Pharmacology, Turku, Finland. She completed her Ph.D. in human nutrition at the University of Southampton, UK, in 2000 and was inspired by the tremendous impacts nutrition may have on human health. She has since completed a series of studies in Finland with a particular interest in exploring the impacts of nutritional determinants, including probiotics, during pregnancy and breastfeeding on maternal and child health. To date, she has contributed about 120 scientific peer-reviewed publications to the nutrition field.

Her research centers on relations between dietary components, metabolic markers, and microbiome with health, the main focus being on early nutrition (mother and child), gut health, and Western diseases including obesity, gestational diabetes, type 2 diabetes, and allergy. One field of study is diagnostics involving early biomarkers (microbiota, serum). The active dietary ingredients studied include probiotics and lipids. She has also ongoing studies related to dietary intake as well as the development and testing of methods, including E-health, for dietary intake assessment in different groups of individuals, and eating behavior and quality of life, with the primary focus groups being children and women during and after pregnancy.