Event Details

21st October at 12:00-13:00
Onsite event
in Presidentti auditorium, BioCity

Prof. Mark Daly, Massachusetts General Hospital; Harvard Medical School, USA
Title TBA

Host: Teemu Niiranen (tejuni@uti.fi)

Mark Daly is the founding Chief of the Analytic and Translational Genetics Unit (ATGU) at Massachusetts General Hospital and Assistant Professor at the Harvard Medical School. His research has historically focused on the development and application of statistical methods for the discovery and interpretation of genetic variation responsible for complex human disease, and with the creation of the ATGU, he and other core faculty are focused on the interpretation of genome sequence and the use of genome information in clinical settings. Mark is also an institute member and co-director of the Program in Medical and Population Genetics at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, where he leads many large-scale genome sequencing studies in autism and inflammatory bowel disease.

Mark was appointed Director of the Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland (FIMM) at the University of Helsinki from February of 2018 through April 2023 while maintaining his lab in Boston. He has returned to Boston and maintains an affiliate position at Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland. FIMM is a translational research institute focusing on cancer, digital diagnostics, genetics, and epidemiology and is home to landmark efforts such as the FinnGen Project.

While developing computational and statistical methods that can be broadly applied, his group has several primary medical genetics research foci. He has an extensive research program in neuropsychiatric genetics – particularly in autism, schizophrenia, and ADHD – and has led large-scale GWAS and exome sequencing efforts in this area. His lab and Dr. Ben Neale’s lab serve as an analytic hub for the Psychiatric GWAS Consortium, an international consortium leading the largest collaborative GWAS studies in 5 major psychiatric disorders. He also has a longstanding effort in the mapping of genes for Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, where he helped found and lead an international effort that has identified more than 150 genetic risk factors and, in collaboration with Dr. Ramnik Xavier’s group, pursues the functional interpretation and clinical ramifications of these continued gene discovery efforts. Along with Dr. Rehm, he is co-PI of the gnomAD project and is committed to ensuring the output of all ATGU genomic research is maximally accessible and useful to the clinical and research communities.

Mark received his B.S. in physics from MIT and his Ph.D. in human genetics from Leiden University, Netherlands.

Selected recent publications

Rare genetic variation in PTPRB is associated with central serous chorioretinopathy, varicose veins and glaucoma. Rämö JT, Gorman BR, … , Palotie A, Peachey NS, Turunen JA, Boon CJ, Ellinor PT, Iyengar SK, Daly MJ, Rossin EJ. Nat Commun. 2025 May 3;16(1):4127

Genome-wide association study reveals mechanisms underlying dilated cardiomyopathy and myocardial resilience. Jurgens SJ, Rämö JT, …, Palotie A, Amin AS, Charron P, Meder B, Ellinor PT, Daly M, Aragam KG, Bezzina CR. Nat Genet. 2024 Dec;56(12):2636-2645

Polygenic risk scores as a marker for epilepsy risk across lifetime and after unspecified seizure events. Heyne HO, Pajuste FD, Wanner J, Daniel Onwuchekwa JI, Mägi R, Palotie A; FinnGen; Estonian Biobank research team; Kälviainen R, Daly MJ. Nat Commun. 2024 Jul 25;15(1):6277

Public platform with 39,472 exome control samples enables association studies without genotype sharing. Artomov M, Loboda AA, Artyomov MN, Daly MJ. Nat Genet. 2024 Feb;56(2):327-335