In her work at Stanford University School of Medicine and University of Geneva as a postdoc, Dr. Lappalainen focused on functional genetic variation in human populations and its contribution to phenotypic variation at the cellular and higher levels, including disease. Her research is based on combining approaches from human genetics, functional genomics and population genetics. She recently led a transcriptome-sequencing project by the international Geuvadis consortium and works in many other genomics consortia, including the GTEx and 1000 Genomes consortia. She earned her PhD from the University of Helsinki in 2009.

For more information about the lecture, visit the New York Genome Center's website.