Professor Tuula Tamminen from the University of Tampere has been made a member of the panel for the Horizon 2020 programme, spearheaded by the European Commission. Tamminen, a child psychiatry expert, says she is reproachful about the use of research funding in Finland, the EU and the whole world.
”It’s unbelievable how little attention is being paid to researching the health and wellbeing of children and adolescents,” Tamminen says.
She says that research into child and adolescent health should be holistic and far-reaching, spanning the development cycle of youths as a whole. Visions of the future, she says, are based on highly theoretical conceptions.
”How children live and get by today is an extremely concrete indicator of what the future may look like in 10—20 years,” Tamminen says.
Professor Tamminen is one of 27 Horizon 2020 panel members, but the only person to represent children’s health.
“What we need is scientific information on children’s health, for resources to be properly managed in the best interest of children and adolescents,” she says.
Collaboration and Nordic voices central
The Scientific Panel for Health acts in an advisory capacity with the European Commission on issues of health. Part of the panel’s job is to define the priorities of health research and scientific innovation. Tamminen says that “building bridges” is now key.
”Even in terms of funding, research topics have to be defined in a way that makes it possible to combine the viewpoints of different scientific disciplines,” Tamminen says. “Insights into early childhood development have been gained thanks to genetic and brain research, for instance. But the information is all very scattered at the moment.”
Tamminen says she wants to bring the high-level expertise of Finnish and Nordic health research to the table as part of her role on the Scientific Panel for Health. The panel’s first meeting will be held in January, 2015.