I am Elena Olmastroni, a post doc researcher at the Department of Pharmacological and Biomolecular Sciences of the University of Milan (Italy). I completed a master degree in Biostatistics at the University of Milan-Bicocca (Italy) in 2017, with a thesis on “Nested case-control studies to assess the association between pioglitazone use and bladder cancer risk in a Swedish cohort with type 2 diabetes”, a project conducted in collaboration with the Centre for Pharmacoepidemiology of the Karolinska Institutet (Sweden). Then, I got a PhD in Experimental, Clinical and Biomolecular Pharmacological Science in April 2022. During my PhD programme, I have gain experiences and improved skills related to: •integrate and use the pharmacological knowledge acquired in order to developing interdisciplinary pharmacoepidemiological studies in the field of health science; •design, conduction and analysis of pharmacoepidemiology and pharmacoutilization studies, mainly through healthcare utilization databases; •the evaluation of the risk/benefit profile of drugs in the context of real-world clinical practice, through both the use of administrative databases and the application of meta-analytic methodologies based on the published results of clinical and/or experimental studies.

Katariina Öörni leads the Atherosclerosis Research Laboratory of Wihuri Research Institute, Helsinki and the University of Helsinki, Finland. Katariina Öörni’s research focuses on the development of atherosclerotic lesions, particularly in examining the retention of LDL and other apolipoprotein B -containing particles in the arterial intima. Her research group has determined mechanisms of LDL aggregation, reported how modification of lipoprotein particles influences their retention in the arterial wall, analyzed the effect of extracellular conditions on these processes and used novel molecular imaging methods in these studies. Recently the group showed that testing LDL aggregation susceptibility can add predictive power to the conventional cardiovascular risk estimation. The overall goal of her research is to understand how accumulating lipoproteins trigger inflammatory responses in atherosclerosis. Katariina Öörni has been a council member of the Finnish Atherosclerosis Society and has represented Finland in the Organizing Committee of the European Lipoprotein Club and in the council of the Scandinavian Society for Atherosclerosis Research. She has been the secretary and treasurer of the Scandinavian Society for Atherosclerosis Research in 1998-2006. She is a Co-Editor of Atherosclerosis, the official journal of EAS. She received the Esko Nikkilä Memerial Lecture Award from the Scandinavian Society for Atherosclerosis Research in 2019.