Keynote speakers and presenters
Biographies of keynote speakers and presenters
Petri Böckerman is Professor of Health Economics at the University of Jyväskylä. He received his doctoral degree in economics from the Helsinki School of Economics in 2003. He has been research economist at Labour Institute for Economic Research since 1996. His main research interests are empirical health and labour economics.
Additional information (Petri Böckerman)
E-mail petri.bockerman(at)labore.fi
Rosa Cheesman is a postdoctoral fellow at the PROMENTA Center, the University of Oslo, Norway. Her work focuses on understanding the interplay between genetic and environmental influences on complex traits like educational performance and depression. To explore this, she combines new genomic tools with family information and administrative data on schools and neighbourhoods. Rosa is also an identical twin.
E-mail r.c.g.cheesman(at)psykologi.uio.no
Perline Demange is a PhD candidate in Biological Psychology at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and will defend her thesis in a few months. She holds a Bachelor's in Biology (Uni. Strasbourg) and a Master's in Cognitive Science (ENS Paris). At the core of her scientific interest lies the question of the mechanisms of intergenerational transmission of (dis-)advantage. During her PhD, she focused on the relationships between educational success, non-cognitive skills, and mental health. She uses genetics as a tool, using methods relying on familial and molecular genetic data, to strengthen the identification of causal mechanisms. She is excited by the interdisciplinary approach necessary to investigate this topic.
E-mail p.a.d.demange(at)vu.nl
Henrik Dobewallis senior researcher at the Finnish Institute for Health (THL) and Welfare in the MEDIG project “Mental health and social disadvantage over the early life course: investigation into genes, families and living conditions” funded by the Academy of Finland. He does research that crosses disciplinary borders of psychology, sociology, and molecular genetics to answer why people do good and feel well. He studies people across the life course, intergenerational transmission, gene-environment interactions, and differences between cultures. Henrik has expertise in register studies, survey research, computational linguistics, and genetically-informed multi-generational cohorts. Henrik organizes the sociogenomics club at THL.
E-mail henrik.dobewall(at)thl.fi
Jani Erola is a sociology professor at the University of Turku, Finland. His research interests are in intergenerational socioeconomic attainment and family demography, plus everything else empirically observable you can link with equality of opportunity. Jani is the founder and the director of INVEST Research Flagship Center (“Inequalities, Interventions and a New Welfare State”), a joint effort of Uni Turku and Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare. Additionally, and the coordination PI of the MapIneq project (Horizon Europe). He is one of Europe’s leading thinkers in questions of social inheritance and has experience in conducting twin analyses using full population register data.
E-mail jani.erola(at)utu.fi
Andrea Ganna is a FIMM-EMBL group leader at Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland (FIMM) and a research associate at Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School. Andrea's research interests lie at the intersection between epidemiology, genetics, and statistics. He leads a diverse group of 18 researchers including biologists, mathematicians, and medical doctors. He is a winner of an ERC starting grant and the Leena Peltonen Prize for Excellence in Human Genetics. He is co-leading two major international consortia: the COVID-19 host genetic initiative, the largest human genetic study of COVID-19, and the INTERVENE consortium, which aims to integrate AI and human genetics tools for disease prevention and diagnosis across biobanks in Europe. He has also initiated the FinRegistry project, one of the most comprehensive registry-based health studies in the world. His research vision is to integrate genetic data and electronic health records to enhance the early detection of common diseases and improve public health interventions.
E-mail andrea.ganna(at)helsinki.fi
Gaia Ghirardi is a PhD student in Sociology at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence. Her PhD project is about gene-environment interactions and educational inequalities. She has a background in sociology and quantitative methods. Her research interests are social stratification, educational inequality, early childhood, sociogenomics.
E-mail gaia.ghirardi(at)eui.eu
Katri Kantojärvi is senior researcher at the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare (THL), THL Biobank. She has a PhD in Medical Genetics and in her thesis she explored the genetic susceptibility to Autism Spectrum Disorders. In THL she has studied genetics of sleep and psychiatric traits and her experience is based on a large body of research on GWAS and the use of PGS, including studies on mental health disorders and behavioral traits.
E-mail katri.kantojarvi(at)thl.fi
Aleksi Karhula is a postdoctoral researcher in the Ecosystems and Environment Research Programme at the University of Helsinki and has a title of docent in the Department of Social Research at the University of Turku. He is also visiting researcher at THL. He has a wide range of research interests including different forms of intergenerational inequalities, segregation dynamics, and sequence analysis methodology. His work has been published in scientific journals such as Demography, European Sociological Review, Plos One, Advances in Life Course Research, and Research in Social Stratification and Mobility.
E-mail aleksi.karhula(at)helsinki.fi
Tina Kretschmer completed a degree in psychology, sociology and pedagogical sciences at the Free University Berlin, Germany and a PhD in Developmental Psychology at the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK (2010). She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Psychiatry London (SGDP) and the University Medical Centre in Groningen before taking up a position at the University of Groningen. Since 2020, she chairs the research group on Youth Studies and was promoted to professor of Pedagogical Sciences with a focus on genetic and environmental origins of behavioral and social development in 2022. She obtained a European Research Council Starting (2017) and a Consolidator Grant (2023) which fund the research presented in this talk.
E-mail t.kretschmer(at)rug.nl
Amal Messai is an engineering student pursuing a dual diploma program at both ENSTA Paris, the oldest "grande école" in France, and ENIT, Tunisia's oldest engineering school. She is pursuing her master's degree in data science at the Institut Polytechnique de Paris starting next year. As part of her academic journey, Amal successfully completed a research internship at the Center for Research in Economics and Statistics (CREST)/ENSAE in Paris, contributing to the “Genetics in social models: FINDME” project. Her academic pursuits are driven by a keen interest in the field of data science and the utilization of mathematical principles in the realm of human sciences.
E-mail: amal.messai(at)ensta-paris.fr
Patrick Präg is assistant professor of sociology at the Center for Research in Economics and Statistics (CREST)/ENSAE in Paris. He's interested in social stratification, health, and wellbeing.
E-mail patrick.prag(at)ensae.fr
Eleanor Sanderson is a lecturer in Medical Statistics at University of Bristol. Her work focuses on methodology for Mendelian randomization, particularly multivariable MR. Alongside extending the statistical methods for MR, she is interested in the application of MR to different data settings and the interpretation of results in those settings. She completed a Phd in Econometrics based in the Economics department at University of Bristol before moving to MRC Integrative Epidemiology Unit, also at Bristol, first as a post-doc and then as a lecturer.
E-mail eleanor.sanderson(at)bristol.ac.uk
Outi Sirniö is a senior research at the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare (THL). She holds a PhD in sociology from University of Helsinki and has worked in Stockholm University and University of Turku before joining THL. She is an expert on issues related to socioeconomic inequalities and studies on register-based data with a specific focus on intergenerational associations and economic inequalities.
E-mail outi.sirnio(at)thl.fi
Felix Tropf is a sociologist, and his current interests focus on social demography, genetics, and the life course. He is an Assistant Professor in Social Science Genetics at CREST/ENSAE, an Associate member of Nuffield College in Oxford and a Visiting Scientist at the Queensland Institute for Medical Research (QIMR) in Australia. He has wide expertise in using genetic data in social sciences and together with Melinda Mills (Oxford) and Nicola Barban (Bologna), he wrote a methodological introductory book published by MIT Press. In 2019, Felix founded and is currently heading an interuniversity research group in Paris, which aims to utilize genetic data for social science research. Felix was recently awarded with the ERC starting grant for the “Genetics in social models: FINDME” project.
E-mail Felix.Tropf(at)ensae.fr
Maria Vaalavuo is a chief researcher at the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare. She is the PI of MEDIG project “Mental health and social disadvantage over the early life course: investigation into genes, families and living conditions” funded by the Academy of Finland. She is also the consortium leader of SustAgeable “Economic and social sustainability across time and space in an ageing society” funded by the Strategic Research Council. Maria’s research interests include, for example, inequality, social sustainability, mental health, and intergenerational transmission of disadvantage. More recently, within the MEDIG project, she has explored how genetic data can be used in answering sociological research questions related to these themes.
E-mail maria.vaalavuo(at)thl.fi
Uku Vainik is associate professor of behavioural genetics at University of Tartu, Estonia, Institute of Psychology & Institute of Genetics. He is also an adjunct professor at McGill University, Canada. His main research topic has been understanding the behavioural roots for obesity and overeating. Uku Vainik plans to use Mendelian randomisation for this, but genetic instruments for behaviour have been lacking. Therefore, his current main activity is mapping the genomics of personality traits and cognitive abilities at Estonian Biobank, with tens of thousands of participants.
E-mail uku.vainik(at)ut.ee
Tobias Wolfram is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of Bielefeld and affiliated with CREST-ENSAE in Paris. His research focuses on the intersection of social science, differential psychology, and genetics. He is particularly interested in the ways that genetics can influence cognitive and non-cognitive traits, leading to stratification in society.To explore these topics, he utilizes both classical quantitative genetics techniques, such as twin studies, and modern genotyped data sources, applying statistical and machine learning to methods to examine various dimensions of socioeconomic status, including educational attainment, occupational status, and income. After finishing his degree in statistics and prior to beginning his PhD, he worked as a data scientist and statistician for a German startup, where he developed a passion for the potential of data science and machine learning in the social sciences.
E-mail twolfram.eisenach(at)gmail.com
