Hedi Peterson was promoted to the position of professor of bioinformatics at the University of Tartu 

The University of Tartu senate promotes Associate Professor of Bioinformatics Hedi Peterson to the position of professor.

Hedi Peterson was born in 1982 in Tallinn. In 2015, she defended her doctoral dissertation in bioinformatics at the Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology, University of Tartu. Since 2014, Hedi Peterson has worked at the Institute of Computer Science as a Research Fellow, Senior Research Fellow and Associate Professor. She has published 41 scientific publications, 18 of them in the last five years. Under her supervision, four doctoral theses have been defended.

Hedi Peterson is a leading bioinformatician and developer of data analysis software and dashboards. “We have studied, for example, the biological mechanisms of the inflammatory marker CRP, mechanisms of Alzheimer's disease, endometriosis and psoriasis. Also, we have created several tools that allow other researchers to analyze omics data quickly and conveniently,” said Peterson.

In addition, she is the coordinator of ELIXIR Estonia, the national Node of European wide life science infrastructure of biological information. The goal of ELIXIR Estonia is to create and conduct domestic and international courses to enable life science researchers conduct their research more easily. This involves general programming and data management courses, as well as training of tools bioinformatics tools developed in Estonia. According to Peterson, the development of the ELIXIR research infrastructure in Estonia is planned to continue in the coming years.

Since the beginning of the pandemic in the spring of 2020, several different data analysis tools for analyzing SARS-CoV-2 data have been developed under the leadership of Peterson and are available on the website https://koroona.ut.ee. In addition, her team participates in applied research related to the study of coronavirus prevalence study and the Covid-19 genome sequencing project.