Ala-Korpela, Mika

Dr Mika Ala-Korpela is working as a Professor of Computational Medicine at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Oulu, Finland and as a Research Director at the School of Pharmacy, University of Eastern Finland, with a strategic lead for the NMR Metabolomics laboratory. He is also an adjunct Research Professor in Systems Epidemiology at the Alfred Hospital, Monash University, Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences in Melbourne, Australia and an honorary Professor of Computational Medicine at the University of Bristol, UK, after working there for over 6 years as a staff scientist and leading the NMR Metabolomics laboratory and research. From mid 2022 till the end of 2023, he is also a Visiting Professor at the Department of Pathology, School of Medicine, University of Valencia, Spain. He has also been one of the principal investigators at the Biocenter Oulu since 2016. His newest project at BCO for 2024-2027 is titled Innovative multi-domain metabolomics paradigm to disrupt metabolic health profiling and to improve cardiometabolic disease prevention. Professor Ala-Korpela was recently awarded a 4-year 0.5 M€ research grant (2023-2027) from the Academy of Finland for a project titled New open access platform of quantitative high-throughput urine metabolomics to uncover molecular risk factors and drug effects on cardiometabolic diseases. He also recently got a 1-year research grant from the Finnish Foundation for Cardiovascular Research for his research in the area of urinary metabolomics in relation to cardiometabolic diseases. His research focuses on the applications of modern ‘omics technologies in large-scale clinical and systems epidemiology to understand the molecular and genetic characteristics of metabolic health and disease development and to utilise these data in advancing disease risk assessment and prevention. His experimental interests are in developing and applying new high-throughput cost-effective molecular methodologies. He has broad expertise in spectral, molecular, and epidemiological data analysis with a special focus and ground-breaking contributions in multivariate statistical analyses in population stratification and risk assessment with novel applications of machine learning and artificial intelligence. Prof Ala-Korpela has pioneered development and applications of serum metabolomics in large-scale epidemiology and genetics. In this area he has also made wide-ranging contributions on commercialization of bioscientific innovations. Prof Ala-Korpela’s more recent new scientific contributions are in relation to causal epidemiology and applications of metabolomics, genetics and Mendelian randomization analyses in drug research and understanding the effects of drug targets on systemic metabolism. He also recently spent almost 2 years at the Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute (Melbourne, Australia) specialising in cutting-edge mass spectrometry lipidomics. He is thus one of the rare scientists having advanced knowledge on both key molecular methodologies in population metabolomics, namely nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy and mass spectrometry. He is an internationally renowned scientist in molecular epidemiology and is repeatedly invited to give scientific presentations (~120 over the last 15 years), assist and review grants for major funding bodies (e.g., UK Wellcome Trust & EU) and review scientific contributions for leading scientific journals (e.g., for various Nature-journals and various leading clinical journals like the New England Journal of Medicine and European Heart Journal). Prof Ala-Korpela has published ~265 articles in international peer-reviewed journals, many of them in his lead or co-lead. A marked portion of his papers has been published in the most appreciated scientific journals in various medical fields, undoubtedly encapsulating his truly multidisciplinary expertise in the area or molecular and medical biosciences. These include contributions, e.g., in Nature, Nature Genetics, Nature Communications, Nature Reviews Cardiology, Science Advances, Circulation, Journal of the American College of Cardiology, European Heart Journal, Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology, Lancet Healthy Longevity, Diabetes, Diabetes Care, Clinical Chemistry, Hepatology, British Journal of Pharmacology, Cell Systems, Molecular Systems Biology, PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine. Since 2017 he has been an Associate Editor for the International Journal of Epidemiology. His H-index is 81 and he has 68 papers with more than or equal to 100 citations; his total number of citations is over 26,500 with a steep increase in annual citations in recent years, i.e., over 3,000 citations in 2022 and in 2023. These are obvious signs of broad scientific relevance of his publications in biomedicine. In a recent bibliometric analysis on metabolomics in coronary artery disease research, Prof Ala-Korpela was classified as the most productive author (Front. Cardiovasc. Med. 9, 804463, 2022).