Professor of Statistics at University of Helsinki, PI at Center of Excellence in Complex Disease Genetics at Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland (FIMM).

Matti Pirinen received a PhD in Statistics in 2009 from University of Helsinki on MCMC algorithms for Bayesian inference. He was a postdoctoral researcher in the group of Peter Donnelly at University of Oxford working on genome-wide association studies of the Wellcome Trust Case-Control Consortium 2 (2009-2012). He completed an Academy Postdoctoral Fellow project (2012-2015) and an Academy Research Fellow Project (2015-2020) at FIMM. From 2023, Matti has been Professor of Statistics at University of Helsinki following a tenure track period 2017-2022 as assistant/associate professor. See his personal homepage for more details.

Doctoral Student, Master of Science

Heidi is working with large-scale genome-wide studies, and doing her PhD focusing on studying the genetic background of migraine. Currently, she is working with a large global migraine genome-wide association meta-analysis data that combines over 100,000 cases and 750,000 controls through an international collaboration. She did her undergraduate studies in statistics at University of Helsinki.

Doctoral Student, Master of Science

Sini is working with the population genetics of Finns. She is passionate about understanding fine-scale genetic structure, and its changes, in Finland and how genetic structure affects the estimation of genetic risk. Sini is also interested in communicating science to the general public. In her undergradute studies, she studied bioinformatics and biotechnology at University of Helsinki.

Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, PhD

Jake Lin is an Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at FIMM CoECDG. Currently he is working on development and application of meta-analysis tools for genetic subtyping and prediction of cardio-vascular disease and diabetes. He received his PhD in Computational Biology (2018, University of Tampere) on Metagenomics tools development and analysis for Type 1 diabetes, focusing on the association of microbiome and virome exposures triggering autoimmunity for the TEDDY and DIPP studies. He was a software engineer in the group of Ilya Shmulevich (2009-2013 Institute for Systems Biology, Seattle) and worked on omics integration and detection of genomic structural aberrations in support of the Cancer Genome Atlas project.   

Master’s student, Bachelor of Science

Linda is working on her master’s thesis, in which she is comparing the performance of the gene prioritization methods on genome-wide association studies of schizophrenia. She is interested in using bioinformatics and statistics to study genetics of complex diseases. Linda is also interested in developing bioinformatics tools. She is studying Life Science Informatics at University of Helsinki and received her Bachelor’s degree in Bioinformatics and Genome Research from University of Bielefeld, Germany. 

Postdoctoral researcher, Doctor of Science (Technology)

Hande studied statistics in her bachelor’s and master’s, and continued her doctoral studies in computer science, where her research focused on modeling genome-wide high-throughput sequencing time series. Hande is interested in developing statistical methods to help disentangle the complex mechanisms of biological processes which are driven by genetics. Currently she is working on multivariate modeling of the effects of genetic variants on disease-risk altering metabolites. She is also interested in developing open-source software and teaching statistics.

Doctoral student, Master of Science

Yu Fu started as a PhD student in 2019 with her main research focus on the role of X chromosome in complex diseases and sex difference, supervised by Taru Tukiainen and Matti Pirinen. She is especially interested in X chromosome inactivation and how escape from it can contribute to sex differences in phenotypes and diseases. She is also interested in the evolution of sex chromosomes. She received her BSc in Biotechnology degree from Central China Normal University, and her MSc in Translational Medicine from University of Helsinki.