People

Mikko Myllymäki, MD, PhD, is a FIMM-EMBL Group Leader at Institute for Molecular Medicine (FIMM) and an affiliated Principal Investigator (PI) in the Translational Immunology Research Program (TRIMM), University of Helsinki. He is also specializing in clinical hematology at HUS Helsinki University Hospital/University of Helsinki. After graduating from University of Oulu, Finland, in 2016, he did a postdoctoral fellowship at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School, where he studied how telomere length and germline predisposition affect stem cell transplantation outcomes in myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS). After moving to Helsinki in 2019, he has worked as an Academy of Finland Clinical Research fellow and as a PI in the Faculty of Medicine, University of Helsinki. Dr. Myllymäki is the Chairman of the Finnish MDS group and a board member of the Nordic MDS group. He was a recipient of the ERC Starting grant in 2026.

Jana Pennonen, MS.c, is an experienced Lab Manager with a great passion for molecular biology and cell culturing. She majored in human genetics at the University of Helsinki in 2017 and has been working at the same Uni since then as a Lab technician/Manager. In her free time, she loves spending time in nature with her dogs, rock climbing, doing agility, swimming, practicing yoga, and occasionally aikido.

Sebastian May-Wilson, PhD, is a Senior Post-Doc in the CHRG from Scotland. His research will focus on the genetic determinants of clonal hematopoiesis of indeterminate potential (CHIP) and mosaic chromosomal alterations (mCAs). He will do this by leveraging population-scale biobanks and datasets including (but not limited to) All of Us, FinnGen and UK Biobank.

Seb joined the CHRG after 3.5 years already working at FIMM in the Data Science and Genetic Epidemiology Lab with Andrea Ganna where he previously worked on the GenCost project studying the genetic drivers of healthcare costs. He conducted his PhD at the University of Edinburgh in the lab of Prof. Jim Wilson, under the tutelage of Dr. Nicola Pirastu. His research interests are primarily in the field of bioinformatics and population genetics, interested in the usage of multiomics and polygenic scores for disease and trait prediction and research.

Miro Nylén, B.Med, is an MD/PhD student at the University Helsinki and an undergraduate bioinformatics student at Aalto University. His research is focused on investigating the clinical impact of clonal hematopoiesis on inherited and acquired disease conditions.

Emil Hiitola, PhD student. After carrying out his Master's thesis work in the lab (graduated with honors from Aalto University in 2024), Emil has continued his work focusing on the role of clonal hematopoiesis in inflammatory diseases. iCANDOC PhD program participant.

Konstantin Matjusinski, B.Sc., after finishing his Master's thesis project in the lab, Konsta has continued as a PhD student in the iCANDOC PhD student program. Before joining the team, he studied the role of transcription factor Prox1 in radiation resistance and investigated the role of beta integrins and sharpin signalling pathways in maintaining vascular homeostasis. 

Juuso Vedenjuoksu is an MD/PhD student at the University Helsinki. His research is focused on finding predictors of myeloid malignancies in large population-level cohorts.

Eero Haanpää, M.Sc., is a PhD student whose project focuses on chromosomal deletions in myeloid cells in the contexts of clonal hematopoiesis-driven immune disease and leukemia. For this purpose, he establishes iPSC-cell based models for hematopoietic stem cells and myeloid cells to understand the changes and mechanisms driven by chromosomal deletions in these cells.

Before joining the group, Eero studied biomedicine and molecular medicine at the University of Eastern Finland, where he worked in prostate cancer research in the Cancer Cell Plasticity-group. In his master’s thesis, he studied how cellular plasticity drives therapy resistance in advanced prostate cancer.

Uliana Potychinskaia, M.Sc., PhD student. Graduated the Molecular Medicine and Innovative Treatment program at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands in 2025. During her studies she joined the Center for Molecular Medicine at Karolinska Institutet as a part of the Autoimmunity and Adaptive Immunity in Rheumatic Disease research group.

Since joining the group, her research will investigate how large chromosomal deletions drive clonal hematopoiesis and focus on developing iPSC-derived hematopoietic stem cell models. Her research interests lie at the intersection of wet-lab and computational approaches to disease biology.