The Integrated Science Lab invites you to join the conversation at a Lunch Pitch. Suresh Jesuthasan wants to develop a new way to measure mental fatigue. Michael Svensson is searching for someone with cluster analysis experience to help explore health and performance in elite female athletes. Agneta Andersson will talk about food web changes in the Gulf of Bothnia.
To encourage cross pollination of ideas between researchers from different disciplines, IceLab hosts interdisciplinary research lunches with the vision of allowing ideas to meet and mate. During the Lunch Pitch Season, the creative lunches take place at KBC (Glasburen) on a Wednesday.
Register to come to the pitch and reserve your lunch by Monday, 20 April at 10am.
Note! The default lunch option is a vegetarian falafel sandwich. You can choose an alternative lunch in a separate form that will be emailed to you once you have registered.
Mental fatigue
Fatigue is a familiar feature of the brain. Everyone gets mentally tired after long stretches of thinking. This usually disappears after sleep. In some conditions, however, such as in chemotherapy, depression or multiple sclerosis, sleep does not help and mental fatigue becomes debilitating. We are currently working to understand the biological mechanisms of severe mental fatigue.
Interested in: At present, mental fatigue is mostly assessed with questionnaires. We would like to a develop a phone based tool that can be used to measure mental fatigue in a robust way. This should ideally work across age groups and across cultures.
Exploring medical, physiological and psychological factors for performance development and health in elite female athletes.
Young female endurance athletes in cross-country skiing (XCS) and biathlon (BiA) who combine upper‑secondary education with an elite sporting career face substantial challenges on the pathway from youth elite to senior elite level. The transition from adolescence to adulthood, academic demands, and a high training load together create considerable stress. As a result, young elite female athletes are at increased risk of nutrient deficiencies, disordered eating, recurrent or prolonged respiratory infections, reduced bone density, and mental health problems, among other concerns.
The ongoing research project is a six-year prospective study in which we monitor training load, performance development, physical and mental health, diet and nutrition, and hormonal and metabolic factors in young female XCS and BiA athletes, starting from their entry into upper‑secondary elite sports schools. Many will naturally end their elite ambitions upon graduation, some due to physical or mental health issues, while a few may eventually compete for podium positions at international senior championships such as the World Championships and the Winter Olympic Games.
The aim of this research project is to identify and describe factors, both individual factors and clusters of factors, which promote or hinder healthy performance development.
If you have skills in cluster analysis and think this project sounds interesting, feel free to get in touch, I be happy to discuss how we can collaborate.
Interested in: Cluster analysis, collaborations.
Food webs’ trophic shifts in the Gulf of Bothnia, northern Baltic Sea
Climate change causes increased precipitation in boreal areas, which in turn leads to elevated inflows of coloured dissolved organic matter to the coast. How will this affect the productivity in the sea?
The changes may lead to decreased phytoplankton production, while the heterotrophic microbial production will increase. In the northernmost basin of the Baltic Sea, the Bothnian Bay, the dissolved organic carbon concentration has increased and the fatty acid quality of herring decreased over the past 25 years, which might be due to rewiring of the food web towards microbes of poor fatty acid quality. We will analyse amino acid stable isotopes (AA-SI) composition in herring muscle to elucidate if the food web channelling has changed over the past 25 years in the Gulf of Bothnia.
Interested in: Establishing contacts.
KBC Glasburen, near the KBC café. Find your way to the venue (mazemap link)
IceLab Lunch Pitches are made possible through funding from KBC for the venue and from Stress Response Modeling at IceLab for their coordination and lunches.
