Matti Pirinen

Academy Research Fellow of the Academy of Finland (2015-2020) at the
Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland (FIMM), University of Helsinki, Finland.

Assistant Professor of Statistical Genomics jointly at the
Department of Mathematics and Statistics and Faculty of Medicine, University of Helsinki, Finland.

Title of Docent in Statistics at the Faculty of Science, University of Helsinki, Finland.

Research group pages at FIMM

Contact: matti.pirinen 'at' helsinki.fi

I work with statistical and population genetics. Recently, in particular methodologies related to

• Genome-wide association studies (both common and rare variants; multivariate phenotypes)
• Modelling heterogeneity in effect sizes across populations/phenotypes/tissues etc.
• Population genetics in Finland and its application to studies of complex diseases and traits (and stamps!).

Software

Publications (PDF)

Teaching

• Genome-wide association studies, fall 2015, Kumpula, University of Helsinki
• Tilastollinen päättely genominlaajuisissa assosiaatioanalyyseissä, 17-Feb-2015, Kumpula, Univ. of Helsinki
• Workshop on re-sequencing and variation data analysis, 19-Sep-2014, Viikki, Univ. of Helsinki
• Genome-wide association studies, fall 2013, Kumpula, University of Helsinki

Master's theses supervised at University of Helsinki

• Lääperi, Mitja, 2015, Linear mixed models for estimating heritability and testing genetic association in family data
• Sandoval Zarate, America, 2015, Discovering disease trajectories from the Finnish Hospital Discharge Register with the MCL algorithm
• Kerminen, Sini, 2015, Genetic population structure in Finland: an advantage of haplotype information over independent genetic markers

Previous positions

• 2012-2015.
  Academy of Finland Postdoctoral Fellow at FIMM.
• 2009-2012.
  Postdoc in Statistical Genetics at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics of University of Oxford
  working with Peter Donnelly and Chris Spencer.
  A member of the analysis group of WTCCC2.
• 2004-2009.
  PhD Student in Statistics at the Department of Mathematics and Statistics of University of Helsinki,
  supervised by Elja Arjas , Dario Gasbarra and Mikko J Sillanpää.
  PhD Thesis (Summary part) Bayesian inference for retrospective population genetics models using Markov chain Monte Carlo methods.
• 2003.
  Summer trainee at the Nuclear Energy Unit at VTT Finland, modelling fluid dynamics.
• 2002.
  Summer trainee at the Inverse Problems Group in Helsinki supervised by Matti Lassas to design MCMC algorithms for X-ray tomography.

Studies

• Mathematics (Mathematical Logic) at the University of Helsinki (1999-2003).
  Master's thesis in Finnish (PDF):
  On the cardinality of the set of equivalence classes of analytic and coanalytic equivalence relations in Polish spaces.
  Supervised by Jouko Väänänen.
• Statistics (Statistical Genetics) at the University of Helsinki (2004-2009).
  PhD thesis (Summary part) Bayesian inference for retrospective population genetics models using Markov chain Monte Carlo methods.
  Supervised by Elja Arjas , Dario Gasbarra and Mikko J Sillanpää.