Dr. Timo Leppänen
Dr. Timo Leppänen got his Ph.D. degree in 2016 at the age of 26 years and his thesis earned a grade of approved with distinction (which is awarded only if the dissertation falls in the category of the top 5% of its field). Since then, he has been a co-head and principal investigator in the Sleep Technology and Analytics Research Group (STAR), a research team focusing on sleep and wellbeing, sleep-related disorders, and the development of novel methods and computational tools for the analysis of polysomnographic data. He is currently an Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering especially sleep analytics in the Department of Applied Physics, University of Eastern Finland, Kuopio, Finland and an Adjunct Fellow at The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia. As an early career researcher, he has published 54 full scientific papers and currently supervises 16 Ph.D. students. Dr. Leppänen has been able to raise more than 3 M€ in external research grants and establish a wide international collaboration network with the world’s top-level scientists and research institutes as well as with industry. He has expertise in the physiology of sleep and sleep disorders (especially obstructive sleep apnoea), machine learning, statistical and big data analyses, and biosignal measurements and thus, providing excellent support to the proposed project.