Veli Mäkinen is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Helsinki and Vice Head of Department. He heads the Genome-scale algorithmics team at the Algorithmic Bioinformatics research group. He has supervised five PhD theses and over forty Master's theses. He is currently supervising three PhD students.
Veli Mäkinen started his career in string algorithms and compressed data structures. As of 2022, he has 116 peer-reviewed publications on these and related topics, with the focus being shifted towards algorithmic bioinformatics, where different high-throughput sequencing data analysis scenarios make near-linear time algorithms that work in small space an appealing target of study. Inspired by this new angle to bioinformatics algorithms, Veli Mäkinen co-authored a textbook on Genome-scale Algorithm Design: Biological Sequence Analysis in the Era of High-Throughput Sequencing, published by Cambridge University Press, 2015.
The new textbook works as the main material for algorithmic bioinformatics courses taught frequently by Veli Mäkinen. He also teaches the general algorithms courses Design and Analysis of Algorithms, String Processing Algorithms, Data Compression Techniques, and projects and seminars related to these topics.
Some current research interests include studying algorithms and computational complexity when moving from sequences to variation graphs in (pan-)genomics, and studying applications of different index structures related to the variants of the Burrows-Wheeler transform.
Besides research and teaching, Veli Mäkinen has an active role in the research community. Some recent activities include co-chairing IWOCA 2016 and guest editing a special issue for Theory of Computing Systems, program committee memberships (CPM 2019, LATIN 2020, WABI 2021, RECOMB 2022), and keynote/invited talks e.g. at the ECCB 2016 workshop on Computational Pan-Genomics and SPIRE 2019.
