Aarno Palotie

Professor Aarno Palotie, MD, PhD is the research director of the Human Genomics Programme at the Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland (FIMM), HiLife. He is also a faculty member at the Center for Human Genome Research at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and an associate member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. He has a long track record in human disease genetics. He has held professorships and group leader positions at the University of Helsinki, UCLA and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. He has also been the director of the Finnish Genome Center and the Laboratory of Molecular Genetics at Helsinki University Hospital.

Aarno Palotie's research utilises the unique Finnish population and healthcare system to improve understanding of the genetic component underlying common diseases. He has chaired several large international research consortia, like the Sequencing Initiative Suomi, SISu, combining all Finnish sequences for a data resource and variant catalogue, the SUPER project, collecting and studying genetics in over 10,000 Finnish psychosis patients, the International Headache Genetics Consortium (IHGC) and the Northern Finland Intellectual Disability (NFID) study. He is the Scientific Director of the large FinnGen project that combines the genome and national health record data from 500,000 Finnish participants. The project is partnered by Business Finland (the Finnish innovation fund), fifteen international pharma companies, Finnish universities and university hospitals, the Institute for Health and Welfare and the Blood Transfusion Service. He has published over 700 articles and book chapters.