Rate My Professor Mariike Kuijjer

Mariike Kuijjer is Associate Professor in Cancer Data Science in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Helsinki, Finland, a position she has held since 2025. She heads the Cancer Data Science group and serves as Director of the iCANDOC Doctoral Education Pilot. Kuijjer maintains a Group Leader role in Computational Biology and Systems Medicine at the Centre for Molecular Medicine Norway, University of Oslo, since 2018. Her prior appointments include Assistant Professor in Computational Cancer Oncology (20% position) at the Department of Pathology, Leiden University Medical Center (2020–2023), and Research Fellow in Biostatistics and Computational Biology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (2013–2018). She obtained her PhD in Bioinformatics and Cancer Genomics from Leiden University Medical Center in 2013, Master of Science in Biomedicine from Leiden University in 2008, and Bachelor of Science in Biomedicine from Leiden University in 2007.

Kuijjer’s research focuses on bioinformatics, computational biology, gene regulatory networks, single-sample network modeling, multi-omics data integration, precision medicine, cancer subtype identification, tumor heterogeneity, and metastatic progression. She developed influential methods including LIONESS for sample-specific gene regulatory network reconstruction and PUMA for incorporating microRNA associations. Key publications encompass “lionessR: single sample network inference in R” (BMC Cancer, 2019), “PUMA: Panda Using MicroRNA Associations” (Bioinformatics, 2020), “Gene regulatory network integration with multi-omics data enhances survival predictions in cancer” (Briefings in Bioinformatics, 2025), and contributions to JASPAR 2026 (Nucleic Acids Research, 2026). Her work has garnered over 6,000 citations. Awards include the Familien Blix Fond award for Outstanding Cancer Research (2024), Charles A. King Postdoctoral Fellowship (2016–2018), and National Cancer Institute Brain Cancer SPORE Career Enhancement Program Award (2020). She is Senior Editor at Bioinformatics Advances, Associate Editor at Cancer Research, and holds roles such as member of the iCAN Data Team and Advisory Board Member of the Nordic Computational Biology network.