Tarja Pitkänen

Introduction

Professor Tarja Pitkänen serves as a Principal Investigator within the ODIN project, bringing decades of experience in environmental health and water microbiology to the consortium. She serves as Professor of Environmental Health at the University of Helsinki and as Chief Specialist at the Water Microbiology Laboratory of the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare, where she combines academic leadership with practical public health expertise. Within ODIN, she guides key subprojects and leads work focused on strengthening wastewater and environmental surveillance systems. Through her work, she supports the development of laboratory capacity and the generation of robust environmental data, helping to advance ODIN’s broader mission of improving infectious disease monitoring and response.

Full Name

Professor Tarja Pitkänen, Chief Specialist

Institutional Affiliation and Professional Experience

Tarja Pitkänen is a Professor in the field of Environmental Health at the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, University of Helsinki, Finland as a part of HOH Helsinki One Health Network. She is coaffiliated as a Chief Specialist at the Water Microbiology Laboratory, Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare, Finland.

Tarja Pitkänen teaches environmental health, and conducts microbial water safety research and holds expertise tasks related to all aspects of water and health. She has a broad expertise on detection methods and infection risk assessment of microbes in water, she is a member of the Finnish waterborne outbreak preparedness team for fecal contamination, and manages wastewater-based infectious disease surveillance with her team members and PhD students. Currently she is involved in several research projects and international expert duties related to the water microbiology and wastewater surveillance.

Educational Background

Title of docent in Molecular water microbiology at the University of Eastern Finland, where she gained a PhD on Environmental microbiology in 2010.

Role in the ODIN Project: 

• Subproject PI of ODIN at the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare
• Subproject PI of ODIN-MPOX at the University of Helsinki

Work Package (WP) and Responsibilities

Leader of Work Package 2 in ODIN, developing wastewater surveillance schemes and providing proof-of-concept wastewater and environmental monitoring data from the ODIN study sites at Tanzania, the DRC and Burkina Faso.

Leader of Work Package 3 in ODIN-MPOX, focusing on developing emergency response in static laboratories by using collection of environmental samples from strategic locations.

Contribution of this Work Package to ODIN’s Overall Goals

Work Package 2 of ODIN and Work Package 3 of ODIN-Mpox are both producing hands-on capacity building for environmental microbiology and for production of environmental data for genomic epidemiology. The collaborative work offers first-hand knowledge and data on implementation of wastewater and environmental surveillance in sub-Saharan Africa, key features to reach the broader objectives of the ODIN consortium.

Contact Details

Research group: https://www.helsinki.fi/en/researchgroups/waterborne-pathogens
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/tarja-pitkänen-34716783
Publications: Tarja Pitkänen (0000-0002-7591-9148) - ORCID