Mika Ala-Korpela

BSc, MSc, PhLic, PhD in Physics, Docent in Biological NMR
Professor of Computational Medicine
Systems Epidemiology

Research Unit of Population Health
Faculty of Medicine

Professor Mika Ala-Korpela

Dr Ala-Korpela is a Professor of Computational Medicine at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Oulu, and a Research Director at the School of Pharmacy, University of Eastern Finland. He is an honorary Professor of Computational Medicine at the University of Bristol, UK, after working there for over 6 years.

Professor Ala-Korpela has been one of the principal investigators at the Biocenter Oulu since 2016. His newest project at BCO for 2024-2027 is titled Innovative multi-domain metabolomics paradigm to disrupt metabolic health profiling and to improve cardiometabolic disease prevention.

Since 2017 he has been an Associate Editor for the International Journal of Epidemiology (IF 7.7, JUFO 3) and he has published 25 papers in the journal.

Professor Ala-Korpela was recently awarded a 4-year 0.5 M€ research grant (2023-2027) from the Academy of Finland, the Research Council for Biosciences, Health and Environment for a project titled New open access platform of quantitative high-throughput urine metabolomics to uncover molecular risk factors and drug effects on cardiometabolic diseases. This funding comes with 213,685 € matching funding from the University of Oulu. He is also supported by a 3-year research grant (2023-2026) from the Finnish Foundation for Cardiovascular Research for his research in the area of urinary metabolomics in relation to cardiometabolic diseases and by a 3-year research grant (2025-2028) from the Sigrid Jusélius Foundation for a project titled Combined quantitative NMR and LC-MS/MS data to unique profiling of lipoprotein and lipid metabolism to understand cardiometabolic health and disease.

Prof Ala-Korpela is listed among the top medical scientists in the world 2025: https://research.com/scientists-rankings/medicine. His ranking is 137 in Finland out of the 225 Finnish medical scientists that reached the list (i.e., the Discipline H-index is at least 70). From the University of Oulu only a handful of currently active scientists reached the list.

His research focuses on the applications of ‘omics technologies in clinical and systems epidemiology to understand the molecular and genetic characteristics of metabolic health and disease development and to utilise these data in advancing disease risk assessment and prevention.

In a recent bibliometric analysis on metabolomics in coronary artery disease research, Prof Ala-Korpela was classified as the most productive author (Front. Cardiovasc. Med. 9, 804463, 2022): https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcvm.2022.804463/full.

Prof Ala-Korpela has published ~275 articles in international peer-reviewed journals, and is in a leading position in 40% of them. A marked portion of his papers has been published in the most appreciated scientific journals in various medical fields, encapsulating his multidisciplinary expertise in the area or molecular and medical biosciences.

His H-index is 87 and he has 79 papers with more than or equal to 100 citations and 15 papers with more than 500 citations; his total number of citations is over 32,000 with a steep increase in annual citations in recent years, i.e., around 3,000 citations a year since 2021. These are obvious signs of broad scientific relevance of his publications in biomedicine.

Five recent representative papers:

ApoB-containing lipoproteins: count, type, size, and risk of coronary artery disease. European Heart Journal 2025;46(27):2691-2701. https://doi.org/10.1093/eurheartj/ehaf207

Personalized Profiling of Lipoprotein and Lipid Metabolism Based on 1018 Measures from Combined Quantitative NMR and LC-MS/MS Platforms. Analytical Chemistry 2024;96(52):20362-20370. https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.analchem.4c03229

Genome-wide characterization of circulating metabolic biomarkers. Nature 2024;628(8006):130-138. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07148-y

Clinical and biochemical associations of urinary metabolites: quantitative epidemiological approach on renal-cardiometabolic biomarkers. International Journal of Epidemiology 2024; 53(1): dyad162. https://doi.org/10.1093/ije/dyad162

Apt interpretation of comprehensive lipoprotein data in large-scale epidemiology: disclosure of fundamental structural and metabolic relationships. International Journal of Epidemiology 2022;51(3):996–1011. https://doi.org/10.1093/ije/dyab156

Research interests

  • Systems & molecular epidemiology
  • Multiple 'omics - metabolomics, lipidomics and genetics
  • Metabolic phenotyping and biomarkers
  • Cardiometabolic health and diseases
  • Disease risk assessment and prevention
  • Large-scale population studies and biobanks
  • Causality and Mendelian randomization
  • Artificial intelligence and machine learning
  • NMR spectroscopy and mass spec lipidomics
  • Scientific robustness and reproducibility
  • Resisting scientific hype

Researcher information

Researcher profiles

Professor Mika Ala-Korpela

Contact information

E-mail

mika.ala-korpela@oulu.fi

Phone number

+358 40 1977 657