Hannele Ruohola-Baker is a Professor of Biochemistry and Associate Director of the Institute for Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine at the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington.
Born in Finland, she received her bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Helsinki, along with a Ph.D. in cell biology from Yale University. Then, she conducted a visiting fellowship at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and subsequently a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, San Francisco.
Ruohola-Baker's research focuses on stem cells and the molecular requirements for differentiation, with particular interest in the role of microRNA and in the relationship between metabolism and epigenetic changes in different types of stem cells. Her research group also has a long-standing interest in studying the Notch and S1P signaling pathway using Drosophila as models of human diseases, particularly Duchenne muscular dystrophy and cancer. The group's work has been hihglighted over 80 times as publications in prestigious journals.