Teaching

Leinonen Retina Laboratory

Teaching Statement

Our laboratory is highly committed to the teaching duties of the School of Pharmacy, Faculty of Health Sciences, at the University of Eastern Finland (Kuopio Campus). We see academic research and teaching as inseparable: once a certain level of expertise is reached, our main academic duty is to share that expertise and help the next generation of scientists grow.

Our teaching philosophy is grounded in the idea that learning happens when students are genuinely engaged in what they see, hear, and do. We do our best to design our teaching so that concepts feel meaningful and are connected to genuine research questions. Rather than expecting motivation to simply appear, we emphasize that motivation often follows action: small steps, visible progress, and hands-on work in the lab are intentionally used to help students move from initial anxiety (which is completely normal) toward a more productive state, ideally even to a “flow” state.

We work with students from diverse cultural, educational and disciplinary backgrounds and approach supervision as individually as possible. We consider each student’s starting point and future aspirations, provide the necessary basic skills, and then encourage them to find their own way of working creatively and rigorously. 

What we teach

Our group contributes to teaching at Bachelor, Master, Doctoral and Postdoctoral levels in pharmacy, pharmacology, and related fields. Currently, we are involved in e.g.:

• Lecture room teaching
  • Basic Methods in Pharmacology 
  • Introduction to Drug Development 
  • Organ Toxicology and Toxicopathology
  • Pharmacology of Drugs of Abuse
• Laboratory and methods teaching
  In Pharmacy Master’s level courses our team supervises practical work in enzymatic and protein assays, western blotting, cryosectioning, histology/immunohistochemistry stainings and imaging, as well as electrophysiological approaches and disease modelling in ophthalmology and the nervous system.
• Seminars and scientific writing
  We supervise/co-supervise seminar work in courses such as Neuropharmacology and Neural Drug Targets) and Pharmacology of Drugs of Abuse
• Supervision and mentoring
  Our group members supervise and co-supervise B.Pharm and Master´s theses in pharmacy, toxicology and biomedicine. We also act as teaching assistants in group and practical work and participate in coursework grading.