Dr Pirita Paajanen

Senior Scientist

Pirita works within the Informatics team.

Pirita’s research is influenced by her training as a mathematician, and now she enjoys applying her rigorous thinking into quantitative problems that arise from sequencing data.

Currently she is interested in understanding the workings of a circadian clock in the natural environment. For this she is studying gene expression data drawn from Arabidopsis on field conditions, building statistical models to elucidate the integration of circadian and environmental signals, as well as working on the simpler model organism cyanobacteria.

Her passion is to study complex problems that might have two or more phenomena working simultaneously and being able to put them together in one explanation. One such example is the reanalysis of mobile mRNA where several different phenomena made it look like mRNA was moving long distances within plants, but with a closer look there are many alternative explanations for this mobility.

Alongside her own research work she is working in the Informatics team, helping and training scientists with a very wide range of bioinformatics problems, whether it is genome assembly, using the latest genome sequencing technologies for cutting edge research, analysing RNASeq data, population genomics or evolution of protein complexes.

Selected Publications

See all of Dr Pirita Paajanen's publications