Guests seminar with Aarno Palotie and Olli Pietilainen "Large Scale Finnish Genomic Resources from FinnGen and SUPER study provide Insights Into Psychotic Disorders"

Biographies

Professor Aarno Palotie, MD, PhD, is Research Director of the Human Genomics program at the Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland (FIMM), Helsinki Institute of Life Science (HiLIFE). He is also a faculty member at the Center for Human Genome Research at Massachusetts General Hospital and an associate member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. He has held professorships and group leader positions at the University of Helsinki, UCLA and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, and has served as Director of the Finnish Genome Center and Laboratory of Molecular Genetics at Helsinki University Hospital.

His research utilizes the unique Finnish population and health-care registers to improve understanding of the genetic components underlying common diseases. He has chaired several major international consortia, including the Sequencing Initiative Suomi (SISu), SUPER (the Finnish Study of Psychosis, collecting and studying genetics in over 10,000 psychosis patients), the International Headache Genetics Consortium (IHGC) and the Northern Finland Intellectual Disability study (NFID), and is Scientific Director of FinnGen, integrating genomic and health-record data from 500,000 participants.

Dr. Olli Pietiläinen, PhD, is Group Leader and Vice Director of the Neuroscience Center, HiLIFE, University of Helsinki. He is a visiting researcher at the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute and an affiliate senior scientist at FIMM. He received his PhD in molecular genetics in Aarno Palotie’s group and completed postdoctoral training at Harvard University with Professor Kevin Eggan, focusing on genomics of iPSC-derived neuronal models.

An expert in complex disease genetics and functional genomics, he co-leads Finnish patient collections including NFID and SUPER-B, integrating genetics, longitudinal health-register data, multi-omics and human stem-cell–derived disease models.