Petri Auvinen, PhD, studied genetics at the University of Turku (Finland) obtaining his MSc in 1987 and his PhD in 1990, and his PhD thesis was about genetics of human enteroviruses. Thereafter he took a three-year postdoctoral fellowship in Turku studying the structure and function of Syndecan1 gene in pre-clinical models and in humans. His second fellowship took place in EMBL Heidelberg, where he studied cell biology of cell polarity of mammalian cells. When moving back to Finland, Dr. Auvinen joined as a senior scientist a group at the Institute of Biotechnology studying molecular and cell biology of alphaviruses and obtained docentship (assistant professor) in virology. In 2000 he changed his subject to DNA microarrays and genomics and was appointed as a group leader and consequently appointed as a laboratory director since 2008. Currently his lab’s work focuses on genomics and metagenomics utilizing state-of-the-art DNA sequencing technologies on various subjects ranging from human health to de novo genome projects on prokaryotic and eukaryotic organism with bioinformatics intimately linked to these activities.