About Us
Dr. Sirpa Kärenlampi
Managing Director, Professor
I am a microbial biochemist by training, working on Escherichia coli for my MSc thesis and on several yeast species for my PhD Thesis. My academic career included several positions in three Universities, visiting fellowship at the NIH (Bethesda, Maryland), and visiting scientist post at the UCLA (Los Angeles).
While holding my professorship on biotechnology, I enjoyed teaching industrial microbiology, plant genetic engineering and other exciting topics, and made a yearly bus tour with the students to visit fermentation facilities and top research groups in industrial applications of biotechnology.
My main research focused on small fruits (secondary metabolites and pathogens) and molecular mechanisms of heavy metal tolerance on model plants, using techniques such as omics (genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, genome annotation).
I have hands-on experience with cell and tissue culture (including transformation of microbial, plant and mammalian cells), complementation analysis, cytotoxicity testing, mutagenesis and selection, cloning, plasmid purification, sequencing, Southern analysis, bioinformatics, protein purification and SDS-PAGE.
In parallel to academic activities, I was involved in risk assessment and served as a scientific expert in the European Commission Scientific Committee and EFSA Panels and working groups. This experience paved the way to a new career as scientific director of Biosafe Ltd.
As founder and managing director of WhiBiotech I want to express my firm support to safe biotechnology.
Mikko Kärenlampi
ICT Specialist
I am a coder. I have over three decades of experience with different kinds of computing platforms and programming languages. I have studied computer science at university, and I graduated from Savonia University of Applied Sciences' Code Academy.