Juha Pekkanen - Biography#

Dr. Juha Pekkanen is currently professor of public health at University of Helsinki and part-time research professor at Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare. He obtained his medical degree from this same university in 1984. In-between he worked over 20 years in Kuopio, Finland, and spent 3 years abroad in the US, in New Zealand, and in Spain.

During his career he has worked on several fields of public health research (cardiovascular, respiratory, socioeconomic differences, environmental health) and in a multitude of collaborative projects. After 1991 his activities have focused on environmental health: outdoor and indoor air pollution, risk analysis, and asthma and allergies.

In outdoor air pollution, Dr. Pekkanen was among the first to show the importance of ultrafine particles and he was leader of the Center of Excellence of Environmental Health Risk Analyses (awarded by Academy of Finland and TEKES) in 2004-7. In indoor air, he was centrally involved in drafting the Finnish Current Care Guideline (2017) for patients exposed to moisture damage and in setting up and running the Finnish Indoor Air and Health 2018-2028 program.

Research on asthma and allergies has advanced from methodological papers and international prevalence surveys to etiologic research. This is the area of research that dr. Pekkanen is currently mostly working on with a focus on indoor and microbial exposures in the farms and in moisture damaged buildings, but also lately on other factors affecting building-related symptoms.

Dr. Pekkanen has coordinated or participated in 22 EU funded multicenter studies and has worked on several national and international expert bodies. In 2006-2013, he was director of Graduate School in Environmental Health at University of Kuopio. In 2013, he was elected epidemiologist of the year in Finland.

Dr. Pekkanen has co-authored 511 peer-reviewed papers of which 157 as first or last author, and 98 other articles. His H-index in WoS is 81. He has supervised 22 PhD thesis.