Riitta Lahesmaa
University of Turku
Finland
Riitta Lahesmaa, M.D., Ph.D. is Academy Professor of the Academy of Finland and the Director of Turku Bioscience Centre, Turku, Finland since 1998. She is the Co-Director of BioCity Turku Centre for Life Span Research.
Dr. Lahesmaa received her M.D. and Ph.D. in immunology from the University of Turku. She was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University Medical Center and a Principal Scientist at Roche Bioscience in Palo Alto, California. She has been a visiting professor at Harvard Medical School , Stanford University and UCSF. She founded and directed Turku Centre for Systems Biology 2000-2015 and has been vice-director of The Academy of Finland CoE in Systems Immunology and Physiology.
Dr. Lahesmaa’s research is focused on molecular systems immunology and aims at understanding molecular mechanisms of type 1 diabetes and other human immune mediated diseases. Her studies have resulted in the identification of novel molecular mechanisms and new regulators of T cell functions.
She is the president of the Finnish Society of Immunology. She has published > 200 original papers and reviews and has several issued patents and patent applications. She has been since 2012 an elected member of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters.