FindingPheno
The University of Turku
Turku, Finland
The University of Turku (UTU) was established in 1920 but its roots reach back to the Royal Academy of Turku in the 1650s. Today, UTU has almost 20,000 students and 3,271 staff members. In June 2013, the European Commission awarded UTU the right to use the HR Excellence in Research logo. This is a token of the University's commitment to continuous development of the position and working conditions of researchers along the guidelines set forth in the European Charter for Researchers.
The UTU researchers participating in FindingPheno come from the Department of Computing within The Faculty of Technology. Research within the department aims to improve our digitalised society, help to solve today's major societal and environmental challenges, and explore new possibilities of computing. In particular, these researchers are part of the Turku Data Science Group headed by Assoc. Prof. Leo Lahti, who leads UTU’s involvement in FindingPheno. This group combines theory and methods of algorithmic data analysis, with a particular focus on probabilistic machine learning, complex systems, high-throughput data analysis and statistical programming. Microbiome research is a key application area addressed by this group, including microbial ecology, bioinformatics and spatial modelling.
Project Contributions
UTU leads WP4 where they collaborate closely with CFER to model the dynamic nature of the living system where the omic and meta-omic data changes over time or across different parts of the organism, and provides input into the other method development tasks in WP3 and WP5. For this UTU brings their expertise in machine learning/AI, probabilistic programming, statistical ecology, and data science along with relevant experience modelling the dynamics of the human microbiome.
