For years I’ve been telling myself: “One day, when things calm down, I’ll build a proper website for the lab.” That sentence should probably win an award for Most Unrealistic Expectation Held by a Scientist, because as anyone in research knows, things never truly calm down, they simply evolve into new forms of chaos.
Still, after starting my lab in September 2021, fresh from five years of postdoctoral adventures in the United States, I carried a quiet dream of having a clean, modern site where people could actually find information without navigating through a maze of outdated subpages from 2012. Thanks to the great team at Call to Action Oy, that dream has now become reality (And yes, someone gently suggested that maybe I shouldn’t try to code it myself. That someone was right). Seeing the finished site for the first time felt oddly similar to seeing a well-resolved ERG trace (retina´s electrical response to light recorded with a cornea electrode) after hours of troubleshooting: sudden clarity, and the realization that the effort was worth it.
For new visitors, a quick introduction: I’m Henri Leinonen, a retinal neuropharmacologist who left Finland in 2016 for what was supposed to be a max three-year postdoc period in the U.S. It somehow turned into five years, two universities, countless experiments, eternal friendships, and one unforgettable lesson that Southern California sunshine does not make science any easier. In 2021, I returned to Kuopio to start my own lab – an exciting milestone and, admittedly, a little terrifying at first.
Four years later, I’m fortunate to lead a group of one postdoctoral researcher, five PhD students, and two part-time grant researchers. We also recently celebrated a milestone of our own: our first postdoc successfully “graduated” from his postdoc and has now moved on to new adventures in industry, an achievement that makes me proud as a mentor and marks a special moment in our lab’s young history.
Our lab notebooks usually contain a mix of serious science (signaling pathways, synaptic remodeling, oxidative stress), ambitious ideas (“Could this compound really do that?”), and occasionally a badly drawn retina that no one admits to sketching. But the atmosphere is exactly what I hoped for: curious, collaborative, and driven by the belief that understanding the retina’s resilience may help us design better treatments for degeneration and ultimately prevent blindness.
This website is our new home for sharing that journey. We will post updates on our research, publications, conference travels, and perhaps sometimes small behind-the-scenes moments from the lab. My hope is that it gives a clear view of who we are and what we try to do – not only as scientists, but as a team working together to push retinal research forward.
Thank you for visiting, and welcome to the very first blog post on the new Leinonen Retina Laboratory website.
Kind regards,
Henri Leinonen, LRL group leader
(group picture credit: Raija Törrönen, UEF)