Rate My Professor Jarno Mäkelä

Jarno Mäkelä is Assistant Professor of Biophysics in the Department of Neuroscience and Biomedical Engineering at Aalto University, where he leads the Single-Molecule Dynamics in Cells group. He joined Aalto in early September 2024, bringing his entire research team, equipment, and funding from the University of Helsinki's Institute of Biotechnology, where he served as group leader since 2022. Previously, Mäkelä held a four-year postdoctoral position at the University of Oxford and a two-year postdoctoral appointment at Stanford University. He obtained his PhD in computational systems biology from Tampere University in 2016. His career trajectory reflects a strong foundation in interdisciplinary research bridging computational modeling and experimental biophysics.

Mäkelä's research employs an interdisciplinary approach integrating biophysics, molecular biology, genetics, machine learning, and computational biology to address how living systems adapt to extreme environments. The group utilizes super-resolution fluorescence microscopy and single-molecule tracking to visualize individual molecule dynamics inside live bacterial cells, probing real-time molecular interactions and intracellular organization. Key focuses include temperature adaptation mechanisms in thermophilic, mesophilic, and psychrophilic bacteria, bacterial chromosome organization, and stress responses, with implications for synthetic biology and biotechnology applications. The lab is supported by prestigious funding, including the ERC Starting Grant TEMPADAPT (2023–2028) for single-molecule visualization of temperature adaptation and the Aalto University RCF Academy Research Fellowship (2024–2027). Mäkelä has authored impactful publications such as 'Nonrandom segregation of sister chromosomes by Escherichia coli MukBEF' (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2021), 'Competitive binding of MatP and topoisomerase IV to the MukB hinge domain' (eLife, 2021), 'Acyl carrier protein promotes MukBEF action in Escherichia coli chromosome organization-segregation' (Nature Communications, 2021), 'Catching an invader' (Nature Reviews Microbiology, 2020), 'Genome concentration limits cell growth and modulates proteome composition in Escherichia coli' (2024), and 'Dynamics of bacterial operons during genome-wide stresses' (2023).