MINNA KAIKKONEN-MääTTä

Professor

Minna Kaikkonen-Määttä is a Professor of Cardiovascular Genomics and Director of the Single Cell Genomics Core at University of Eastern Finland. She obtained her Bachelor's degree in Cellular Biology and Physiology from the Claude Bernard University Lyon 1, France, in 2002 and Master’s degree in Molecular Biology from University of Jyväskylä, Finland, in 2005. She obtained her PhD in Molecular Medicine in 2008. She did her postdoctoral studies at University of California San Diego investigating transcriptional gene regulation and enhancer RNAs (2009-2012) before moving to University of Eastern Finland to establish her own research group. She is the vice head of A.I.Virtanen Institute, President of the Finnish Society of Atherosclerosis and member of the board of European Vascular Biology Organization, Scandinavian Society of Atherosclerosis, and Membership Engagement Committee of the American Society of Human Genetics.

Contact info

Organization

Faculty of Health Sciences, A.I. Virtanen Institute for Molecular Sciences

Email

minna.kaikkonen@uef.fi

Phone

+358 40 355 2413

Keywords

adipose tissue bioinformatics chromatin coronary artery disease endothelium epigenetics gene regulation liver macrophage non-coding RNA smooth muscle transcription

Research groups and research projects

The Kaikkonen lab investigates transcriptional mechanisms that regulate the development of atherosclerosis and cardiometabolic diseases. A combination of cellular and genetic model systems, single cell transcriptomics and epigenetics, high-throughput functional genomics techniques and bioinformatics are used to unravel the genetic and environmental factors that contribute to disease. The lab is particularly interested in understanding the regulatory code that drives cell type- and disease- specific gene expression which resides in the non-coding parts of the genome.