Rate My Professor Teemu Niiranen

Teemu Niiranen, MD, PhD, is Professor of Internal Medicine in the Department of Clinical Medicine at the University of Turku Faculty of Medicine since 2020. He is a physician-scientist and clinical hypertension specialist with a track record of productivity in hypertension research, successful mentoring, international research grant procurement, and inter-institutional international collaborations. After completing his PhD in 2008 at the University of Turku in Internal Medicine and finishing clinical training, he received in-depth post-doctoral training in cardiovascular disease epidemiology and omics at the Framingham Heart Study, the oldest and most prestigious cardiovascular cohort study. Prior to his professorship, he was selected as one of the new Group Leaders of the University of Turku Collegium for Science and Medicine. Additionally, he is employed as a Medical Specialist by the National Institute for Health and Welfare and chairs the Cardiometabolic Clinical Expert Group of the FinnGen study, a project that has genotyped up to 500,000 unique Finnish blood samples and merged this genetic data with nationwide healthcare registers.

Niiranen's research expertise encompasses cardiovascular epidemiology, cohort studies, blood pressure, hypertension, blood pressure measurement, home monitoring of blood pressure, and the relation between hypertension and omics such as genome, metagenome, and metabolome. He has produced over 250 publications, including first- or last-author articles in BMJ, Circulation, European Heart Journal, Nature Communications, and JAMA Cardiology, which are cited by the European, American, British, and Japanese clinical hypertension guidelines. Notable publications include 'Worldwide trends in hypertension prevalence and progress in treatment and control from 1990 to 2019: a pooled analysis of 1201 population-representative studies with 104 million participants' (The Lancet, 2021), 'FinnGen provides genetic insights from a well-phenotyped isolated population' (Nature, 2023), '2023 ESH Guidelines for the management of arterial hypertension' (Journal of Hypertension, 2023), 'Sex differences in blood pressure trajectories over the life course' (JAMA Cardiology, 2020), and 'Heritability and risks associated with early onset hypertension' (BMJ, 2017). He has received young investigator awards from the American and Finnish Societies of Hypertension and the American Heart Association, served as past chair of the Finnish Hypertension Society, mentored 12 PhD students, and co-authored the Finnish and European Society of Hypertension clinical hypertension guidelines.