Matti Pirinen

• Course on Genome-wide association analyses Jan-Mar 2019
• What do we do?
• Research group pages at FIMM
• Possible PhD students and Postdocs send me email or apply through our Centre of Excellence programme.

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 at University of Helsinki

• Genome-wide Association Studies, Jan-Mar 2019 (III period), Msc programme in Life Science Informatics.
• High Dimensional Statistics, Oct-Dec 2017 (II period), Msc programme in Mathematics and Statistics. (Lecture material.)
• Genome-wide Association Studies, fall 2015, Department of Mathematics and Statistics.

PhD theses supervised

• Benner, Christian, 2019, University of Helsinki
  FINEMAP: a statistical method for identifying causal genetic variants.
  Supervisors: M. Pirinen (UH) and S. Ripatti (UH).
• Cichonska, Anna, 2018, Aalto University & University of Helsinki
  Machine learning for systems pharmacology.
  Supervisors: J. Rousu (Aalto), T. Aittokallio (UH), M. Pirinen (UH).

Master's theses supervised at University of Helsinki

• Hautakangas, Heidi, 2018, LD Score regression for estimating and partitioning heritability of lipid levels in the Finnish population
• Tuominen, Samuli, 2018, Association between polygenic methylation scores and maternal phenotypes
• Ruotsalainen, Sanni, 2017, Univariate and multivariate statistical tests in genetic association studies
• 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.