Ilkka Lappalainen is the Deputy Head of ELIXIR Finland and leads a group that provides data management services for the national research organisations. The aim is to ensure secure, scalable and international standards compliant research environment through active engagement with organisations such as ELIXIR, BBMRI and EuroBioImaging. Ilkka coordinates the Finnish involvement in many other works streams such as Discovery, DURI, Cloud, Large Scale Genomics, Clinical&Phenotypic Data Capture. Before his current position he worked as the ELIXIR Human data coordinator at the ELIXIR-Hub and a Project lead for the EMBL-EBI European Genome-phenome Archive (EGA) and Database of Genomic Variations archive (DGVa). He gained postdoctoral experience at the University of Cambridge and a PhD from the University of Helsinki focusing on biophysical and bioinformatical properties of genomic variants causing rare disorders.