Jonathan Knowles held a Distinguished Professorship in Personalised medicine at FIMM 2010-2014 and his work at FIMM continues as Visiting Professor. Jonathan Knowles is also Visiting Professor at the University of Oxford, Member of the European Molecular Biology Organization, Professor Emeritus at EPFL, Lausanne and a visiting Scholar at Pembroke College, Cambridge.
Jonathan Knowles attended Magdalen College School in Oxford and received a First Class Honours Degree in Molecular Genetics from the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK. He received his Ph.D. in Genetics of Mitochondria with Professor G. H. Beale F.R.S. from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland
Professor Knowles was Head of Group Research and Member of the Executive Committee at Roche up to the end of 2009. He was a member of the Genentech Board for the last 12 years and a member of the Chugai Board for seven years. Prof. Knowles was also the chairman of the Corporate Governance Committee of Genentech. Under his leadership, the company developed and implemented a strategy of highly effective therapies based on personalized healthcare.
He was, for 5 years, the Chairman of the Research Directors’ Group of EFPIA (European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industry Associations) and was the first chairman of the Board of the Innovative Medicines Initiative, a unique public-private partnership between 28 Pharmaceutical companies and the European Commission with the participation of over 200 academic institutions in Europe with a budget of more than 5 Billion Euros over ten years. Prior to this, he served as Director of the Glaxo Institute in Geneva for 10 years and as Head of European Research for Glaxo Wellcome.
In 2011, Jonathan Knowles was appointed as a Trustee of Cancer Research UK, one of the world’s leading Cancer Research Organisations and as Board member of A*Star, the leading state research organisation in Singapore. He was Chairman of Immunocore Ltd. and Adaptimmune Ltd, two leading UK Cancer Immunotherapy companies and serves as a non-executive member of a number of Biotech company boards and on the international scientific advisory boards of several Public Organisations.
Olli Pietiläinen, PhD, is a Group Leader at the Neuroscience Center (NC), HiLIFE, University of Helsinki, and a Visiting Researcher at the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad institute. His group (Genomics of Human Brain Disorders) focuses on understanding mechanisms underlying psychiatric and neurodevelopmental disorders. The work leverages large cell collections from sequenced cohorts of individuals with psychotic and developmental disorders with detailed clinical history. The group applies multifaceted genetic, experimental biology, and functional genomics approaches to interrogate biological mechanisms associated with natural genetic risk variants in iPSC- derived neuronal models. In collaboration with researchers at FIMM, the Pietiläinen group works to move genetic discoveries into functional biology and disease mechanisms. The work unties a multidisciplinary team of researchers at FIMM and NC from genetic epidemiology, bioinformatics, and molecular cell biology.
Peter Horvath is a Group Leader and a Director of Institute of Biochemistry at the Biological Research Center of the Hungarian Academia of Sciences in Szeged and a Visiting Scientist at FIMM. He hold a Tekes/Business Finland Finnish Distinguished Professor (FiDiPro) Fellow position at FIMM 2014-2018 and continued as a Group Leader at FIMM after this position. He graduated as a software engineer and mathematician, and received his Ph.D. from INRIA and University of Nice, Sophia Antipois, France in satellite image analysis. Between 2007 and 2013 he was a senior scientist at the ETH Zurich, in the Light Microscopy Centre.
Peter Horvath is interested in solving computational cell biology problems related to light microscopy and is involved in three main research fields; 2/3D biological image segmentation and tracking; development of microscopic image correction techniques and machine learning methods applied in high-throughput microscopy.
Hannele Laivuori is a Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Tampere University Hospital and Faculty of Medicine and Life Sciences, University of Tampere. Her research interests are common disorders of pregnancy: pre-eclampsia, fetal growth restriction, and gestational diabetes mellitus. The impact of these disorders is not limited to merely obstetric and pediatric domains. They are also associated with increased risk of morbidity in later life of both the mother and the child. We investigate susceptibility genes, molecular mechanisms, risk factors, and implications to later life of these pregnancy disorders.