PEOPLE

Dr. Kaartinen is an Associate professor at McGill University in the Faculty of Dental Medicine and Oral Health Sciences and Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences (Division of Clinical and Translational Research: Experimental Medicine) and (Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology in School of Biomedical Sciences). She also a member of RI-MUHC and The Metabolic Disorders and Complications (MeDiC) Program.
Dr. Kaartinen has an MSc degree in Organic Chemistry from University of Jyvaskyla, Finland, and a PhD-degree (1999) in Biochemistry from the Department of Biochemistry and Biotechnology in University of Kuopio, Finland (currently University of Eastern Finland). She completed her postdoctoral training in bone and extracellular matrix biology in the Faculties of Medicine and Dentistry at McGill University, and joined McGill University as an Assistant Professor in 2002 and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2009. She has acted as Director of Biomedical Sciences in the Faculty of Dentistry, and Director of Centre for Bone and Periodontal Research untill 2025.
Dr. Kaartinen is a PhD Program Director in FDMOHS and is interested in promoting critical thinking and academic integrity. She is a course director of DENT 663 Principles of Health Research, DENT 665 Leadership and Management Skills in Research. She teaches also in DENT 664 Communication Skills in Research and DENT 669 Extracellular Matrix Biology.
Dr. Kaartinen has worked on transglutaminases, their substrates and roles in cellular differentiation for over 20 years and acted as the Chair of Gordon Research Conference on Transglutaminases in Human Disease Processes in 2018. She is a member of the Editorial Board for Cell Death and Disease

Other Kaartinen sites:

https://www.mcgill.ca/expmed/dr-mari-kaartinen

https://www.mcgill.ca/dent-biomedical/research-axes-and-researchers/mari-kaartinen

https://rimuhc.ca/-/mari-kaartinen

Elahe Mirzarazi Dahaghi has completed her BSc-degree in Genetics from ShahreKord University and a MSc-degree of Biochemistry from Institute of Biochemistry and Biophysics at University of Tehran, Iran. In her MSc project, she worked on signaling pathways involving in blood cancer. After graduation, she worked in pharmaceutical company and Health Science academic institute for 3 years. She is now pursuing her PhD-degree in Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology in Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences. Her project involves understanding the role of cellular fibronectin in development of insulin resistance related to obesity. Elahe defended her PhD in October 2025.    

Pier Raffaele obtained his MSc in Biological Sciences at the University of Camerino (Italy). His master’s thesis investigated the bone regeneration potential of 3D-printed biomaterial systems with anti-inflammatory properties. After graduation, he joined the Laboratory of Bone & Bone Marrow Metabolism, where he studied novel gene therapy approaches to remodel the bone marrow environment during ageing and inflammatory bone diseases. Pier is enrolled in PhD program of the Faculty of Dental Medicine and Oral Health Sciences and his project is focused on mechanisms how plasma fibronectin contributes to the bone marrow microenvironment and mechano-signaling to promote osteoblastogenesis in vitro and in vivo.

TBA

Natalie Coffey is studying to complete her BSc degree in the Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology in Faculty of Medicine. She joined the lab in the beginning of 2025 as a volunteer and became an undergraduate research assistant during the summer of 2025. She is working on generating user manuals for new CFI infrastructure and testing them via research projects that involve ECM extractions for proteomics, histology processing and staining; to highlight a few. 

Amrita Gosaine completed her BSc degree at McGill University in Anatomy and Cell Biology (Honours). She joined Kaartinen lab in Winter 2021, where she completed ANAT 396 research course and developed a literature review of bone marrow niches, extracellular matrix and cellular differentiation. During the summer 2021, she was an undergraduate Research Assistant. She also completed her Honours research program in Kaartinen  lab (ANAT 432) in the Fall 2021-Winter 2022, where she studied links between ECM and adipose tissue cellularity. Amrita coauthors a paper in Physiological Reports with us and is now a PhD student at McGill. 

Taylor Traaseth has completed her Honours BSc degree at McGill University in Anatomy and Cell Biology. She joined the Kaartinen lab to complete her Honours Research Project (ANAT 432) in Fall 2021 – Winter 2022. Taylor studied plasma fibronectin network assembly in hypertrophic adipocytes using immunofluorescence visualization and quantification. Taylor is now in Medical School.

Anny Hang was a Computer Science and Biological major when she joined the lab in 2020 as a summer scholar of McGill Initiative in Computational Medicine (MiCM). Her project was to investigate the matrisome gene expression in obesity using transcriptomic data from obesity-discordant monozygotic twins. Anny published her work in 2022 as co-first author with Dr. Kaartinen in Matrix Biology. She is currently pursuing a MSc degree at in Epidemiology at Université de Montréal. 

Mansi Arora had BTech-degree in Bioinformatics from Jaypee University of Informational Technology, India, when she joined Kaartinen lab. Her project was a computational study involving examining links and associations of F13A1 gene expression with markers and pathways leading to metabolic disturbances in humans. She published three papers from her project and graduated with MSc degree in Experimental Medicine in 2021.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=Arora+M+and+Kaartinen+MT&sort=date

Preeti Bhatt had an BTech-degree in Biotechnology from Amity University, India, when she enrolled in the MSc program of the Division of Experimental Medicine, in the Faculty of Medicine at McGill. Her project aimed at investigating the role of plasma fibronectin in bone marrow adipogenesis and in bone loss and she is working with bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells and mouse models of osteoporosis. She graduate with MSc in MSc degree in Experimental Medicine in 2020. Since graduating she has worked for StemCell Technologies in Vancouver BC.

Huifang Sun had a BSc-degree in Dental Surgery from Zhengzhou University and a MSc degree in Dental Science from Wuhan University, China, when she entered Kaartinen lab and PhD studies in Craniofacial Health Sciences in the Faculty of Dentistry. Her MSc studies were aimed at aimed at understanding how the primary cilia of human periodontal ligament cells sense and transduce orthodontic forces and she has also worked on bone matrix proteins. In Kaartinen lab at she studied studying the role of transglutaminases in osteoclastogenesis and osteoclast function and used biochemical and chemical biology methods in primary monocyte and macrophage cultures. She defended her thesis 2019. Huifang is currently an Assistant Professor in Wuhan University in China. Huifang publsihed following four papers from her PhD work: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=Sun+H+and+Kaartinen+MT+&sort=date