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

Aarno Palotie’s research utilizes the unique Finnish population and health care to improve our understaning of the genetic component underlying common diseases. He  has chaired several large international research consortia, like the Sequencing Initiative Suomi, SISu (www.sisuproject.fi) combining all Finnish sequences for a data resource and variant catalogue, the SUPER project (www.superfinland.fi) collecting and studying genetics in over 10 000 Finnish psychosis patients,  the International Headache Genetics Consortium (IHGC, www.headachegenetics.org) and the Northern Finland Intellectual Disability (NFID) study. He is the Scientific Director of the large FinnGen  project (www.finngen.fi) 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), several international pharma companies, Finnish Universities, University Hospitals, the Institute for Health and Welfare and the Blood Transfuson service.  He has published over 700 articles and book chapters.