Tuuli Lappalainen

Tuuli Lappalainen, PhD, is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Systems Biology at Columbia University, and an Assistant Investigator and Core Member at the New York Genome Center. Prior to joining the New York Genome Center in 2014, she did postdoctoral research at Stanford University in California and University of Geneva, Switzerland. She received her PhD from University of Helsinki, Finland in 2009. Her research focuses on functional genetic variation in human populations and its contribution to human traits and diseases. She has pioneered in integrating large-scale genome and transcriptome sequencing data to understand how genetic variation affects gene expression, which gives insight to biological mechanisms underlying genetic disease risk. She has contributed to many of the most important international research consortia in human genetics, including the 1000 Genomes Project, the Geuvadis Consortium, the GTEx Project, MoTrPAC, and TOPMed. In 2018, she was awarded the Leena Peltonen Prize for excellence in human genetics.