Mark Daly is Director of the Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland at HiLIFE, University of Helsinki. He retains also active affiliations at the Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital and the Broad Institute. Dr. Daly focuses on development and application of statistical methods in human disease genetics and has made major contributions to gene discovery in inflammatory bowel disease, autism and schizophrenia. At FIMM, he explores research and translational uses of Finnish biobank, registry and genome data. Dr Daly is a co-architect of the FinnGen project ( a landmark public-private effort to integrate decades of medical registry data with genomic data in 10% of the Finnish population. During the current pandemic, he has also been involved in launching the COVID-19 host genome initiative, which he is currently coordinating together with Dr. Andrea Ganna from FIMM.
In his talk, Dr. Daly will discuss how host genetic variation can impact both individual susceptibility to infection and response/severity post-infection. He will also present the the COVID-19 host genetics initiative ( which in only three months has launched a global community effort to immediately provide the most conclusive host genetics impact.
This talk was part of the event “Fighting the pandemic – COVID-19 research at the University of Helsinki” organized by HiLIFE (
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