Minna Kaikkonen-Määttä was born in 1980 in Kiuruvesi, Finland. She obtained her Bachelor’s degree in Cellular Biology and Physiology from the Claude Bernard University Lyon 1, France, in 2002 and Master’s degree in Molecular Biology from University of Jyväskylä, Finland, in 2005.

She obtained her PhD in Molecular Medicine under the supervision of Prof. Seppo Ylä-Herttuala in Kuopio in 2008. Her doctoral studies were focused on “Engineering Baculo- and Lentiviral Vectors for Enhanced and Targeted Gene Delivery”. She did her postdoctoral studies with Prof. Christopher Glass at University of California San Diego where she shifted her research focus into transcriptional gene regulation and enhancer RNAs supported by the Young Investigator Award from Leducq Foundation.

She started her own lab in 2015 at the University of Eastern Finland with a focus on gene and cell level understanding of atherosclerosis using state-of-the-art next generation sequencing methods. Currently she is a tenured Associate Professor in Cardiovascular Genomics and runs a lab of 20 members while acting as a Director of the Single Cell Genomics Core. She has published 80 peer-reviewed articles with ~3800 citations (H-index 29).

She has received over 5 million in research funding and is currently supported by the European Research Council Starting Grant, Academy of Finland, Finnish Foundation for Cardiovascular Research and Sigrid Juselius Foundation.

She is the President of the Finnish Society of Atherosclerosis and member of the board of European Vascular Biology Organisation, Scandinavian Society of Atherosclerosis, and Membership Engagement Committee of the American Society of Human Genetics.