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Areas of expertise
Biography
Heli Harvala was appointed as a Professor of Virology at the Institute of Biomedicine, University of Turku, Finland in September, 2024.
She graduated in Medicine, obtained a MSc in Organic Chemistry and a PhD in Virology at the University of Turku, Finland, in 2003. Subsequently she completed her Medical Virology training in Edinburgh and became a Fellow of the Royal College of Pathologists in 2015. During that time, she joined the European Public Health Microbiology fellowship programme at the Public Health Agency of Sweden for two years before returning back to the UK. Over the last ten years, she has combined her work as a Consultant Medical Virologist with clinical, transfusion and public health related virology research.
Teaching
She is currently involved in the undergraduate teaching of medical and biomedical students, being responsible for the virology part of that. She has previously been involved in the Undergraduate teaching at the University College of London, University of Edinburgh, the University of Oulu and at the University of Turku. She is also actively engaging with Postgraduate teaching by supervising both PhD and MSc students, and has undertaken PhD Supervisors training at the University of Oxford. Furthermore, she has extensive experience in Clinical Virology specialty training; she has been trained educational supervisor in Clinical Virology since 2016 and trained Royal College of Pathologist Examiner in Clinical Virology since 2017.
Her interest includes developing training further and as an example, she developed a new three-day module in Phylogenetics and Bioinformatics for European Centre for Disease Control (ECDC) Stockholm with the microbiological cases studies in 2016. Subsequently, she led the developing and delivering this for the ECDC summer schools in Stockholm, 2016 and 2017, and for the ECDC EPIET/EUPHEM fellows in Berlin, 2017 and 2018.
Research
She is a co-founder of the European Non-Polio Enterovirus Network (ENPEN) which evaluates the importance of enterovirus infections and monitors for their emergence together with collaborators from over 30 European countries. During COVID-19 pandemic, she was involved with setting up SARS-CoV-2 testing of convalescent plasma donors in England, and the related international REMAP-CAP trial. She also has wide interests in molecular epidemiology and next generation sequencing, and is involved with investigations into how next generation sequencing could be used to enhance the effectiveness of microbiological donation screening.
She leads the Blood Safety research team within the NIHR funded Blood and Transplant Research Unit at the University of Oxford. This research focuses on transfusion transmitted viral infections aiming to improve our understanding of current risks and preparedness for emerging pathogens. She also recently led the work in identifying occult hepatitis B infections as a blood transfusion risk in England and has done pioneering work to investigate pre-exposure prophylaxis use among syphilis infected blood donors. While these activieis continue, she is currently establishing her research group at the University of Turku.
Prof Harvala is widely published in the field of medical, transfusion and public health virology (over 130 peer reviewed publications, h-index 48). She is an executive committee member of European Society for Clinical Virology and the programme committee member for the European Society for Clinical Microbiology and infectious Diseases. She was recently appointed to the WHO European Region Commission for the Certification of Poliomyelitis Eradication, and previously chaired the WHO R&D Blueprint group on Picornaviruses, the Microbiology Specialist Interest Group for the British Blood Transfusion Society, the Panel of Senior Virology Examiners for the RCPath and the Standing Advisory Committee for Transfusion Transmitted Infections.