genomeboy.com

Professor Leena Peltonen-Palotie, a member of the Academy of Finland and one of the world’s leading molecular geneticists, has died at the age of 57 after a two-year battle with cancer.

Peltonen-Palotie’s research combined basic molecular biology with medicine to provide a better understanding of different diseases, and in a distinguished career she won numerous international accolades and headed research groups at the University of Oulu, the University of Helsinki, the National Public Health Institute of Finland, the University of California in Los Angeles, the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Boston, Mass. and the Sanger Institute in Cambridge.

Leena Peltonen-Palotie’s passing at such a relatively early age is a huge blow to Finnish science, and in a lengthy obituary on the Academy of Finland’s website, the Academy’s President Markku Mattila noted that: “she has been a role model, both to scientists around the world and to individuals who hope to embark on careers in research. She has left a void in the Finnish scientific community that will be impossible to fill.”