Areas of expertise
Biography
I am currently a Professor of Statistics at the Department of Mathematics and Statistics and the Department of Clinical Medicine of the University of Turku (Finland). Before moving to Turku, I worked for almost 20 years on vaccination-related research questions at the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare.
Teaching
My teaching revolves around various topics related to biostatistics, with emphasis on real-life data analysis and statistical modelling. My recent lecture courses include "Survival analysis", "Design of experiments" and "Statistical methods in epidemiology".
Research
My own research interests include statistical modelling and analysis of infectious disease data, estimation of vaccine efficacy from trial and field data, dynamics of pneumococcal carriage and its relation to disease, and the effects of vaccination on the epidemiology of the pneumococcus. I have a special interest in Bayesian analysis of incompletely observed infectious disease data and Markov chain Monte Carlo methods applied to deal with the problem. My recent publications in the field of infectious disease data include a survey study of the intensity of social contacts and an analysis of the effectiveness of case isolation and quarantine during the early phase of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic in Finland. Through my students, I have recently become involved in the analysis of causal mediation in cohort and microbiome studies.