Professor Juhani Eskola
Deputy Director General - National Institute for Health and Welfare, Finland
Juhani Eskola, MD, PhD, is Deputy Director General of the National Institute for Health and Welfare of Finland, being responsible for all activities related to prevention and control of infectious diseases, vaccines, vaccinations and environmental health. He serves as a consultant, evaluator or scientific adviser in several international development projects such as Tuberculosis Vaccine Initiative, TBVI and European Vaccine Initiative, EVI, and is a member of the Board of Trustees of International Vaccine Institute, IVI.
Professor Eskola graduated with a medical degree from the University of Helsinki in 1975, and received his PhD in medicine in 1983. He is a specialist in paediatric infectious diseases and a docent at the University of Helsinki.
He worked as general practitioner, paediatrician and infectious disease specialist until 1991, when he moved to the Finnish National Public Health Institute, serving there as Research Professor and Department Head, first in the Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology and later in the Department of Vaccines. During the years of 2000 to 2003, he worked as Senior Vice President at Aventis Pasteur in Lyon, France, being responsible for global medical affairs and clinical development of all vaccines in the company.
Professor Eskola has focused his research in the clinical development and evaluation of vaccines, especially of polysaccharide-protein conjugate vaccines and combination vaccines used in childhood in the past. During recent years his main interest has shifted into the clinical development of tuberculosis vaccines, vaccine safety issues, and into modeling and measuring the impact of wide scale vaccinations.
Last updated: 1 September 2010