Sanna Koskela

Sanna Koskela is the Manager of PTR-Bioimage Analysis team at Janelia Research Campus, where she leads and coordinates image annotation and analysis efforts supporting a wide range of research projects. In this role, she oversees complex annotation and curation workflows for large-scale 2D, 3D, and 4D imaging datasets, contributes to data production and quality control, and manages and mentors a team of PTR technicians involved in image analysis projects. She works closely with labs and project teams across Janelia to ensure timely delivery of high-quality datasets and effective collaboration around data generation and analysis.

Sanna joined Janelia as a postdoctoral researcher in the Reiser Lab, where she studied the neural basis of visual motion processing using behavioral experiments and electrophysiology. Her work focused on motion-sensitive neurons in the fly visual system, within the context of emerging connectomic efforts linking neural structure and function.

Sanna studied biology at the University of Eastern Finland, with a Master’s thesis on parental effects on offspring viability in brown trout. After a summer with the Lund Vision Group conducting behavioral experiments on bumblebees, she became fascinated by visual systems and pursued neuroscience at the University of Helsinki. During her Ph.D., she investigated how sparse signals from individual retinal neurons relate to behavioral performance in mice and frogs, including work showing that mice adopt different behavioral strategies in dim-light detection tasks during night versus day, resulting in markedly improved nighttime performance.

Sanna is also passionate about scientific community building and mentoring and has organized community events at Janelia, including the MCN Janelia Philosophy of Science book club.