Sami Oikarinen, PhD, Associate professor, is a virologist and research group leader at Tampere University, Faculty of Medicine and Health Technology, Finland. His research focuses on viral epidemiology and ecology, with particular emphasis on wastewater-based epidemiology, viral metagenomics, infection surveillance, and the links between viral infections and chronic diseases.
Oikarinen received his PhD in Virology from the University of Tampere in 2017. He was appointed Docent in Molecular Virology at the University of Tampere in 2019. He has served as a research group leader since 2019, first leading the Environmental Health Research Group and, since April 2025, the Medical Virology Research Group at Tampere University.
His research combines virology, molecular biology, metagenomics, bioinformatics and epidemiology to develop new approaches for monitoring infections and population health. A particular focus of his work is the use of wastewater as a population-level source of information on circulating viruses and infectious disease dynamics. His group has developed and applied whole-virome and targeted sequencing approaches to characterize viral communities in wastewater and to identify viral signals that can be linked to clinical, epidemiological and population-level health data. This work has contributed to the development of longitudinal and national-scale wastewater virology datasets and infrastructure for monitoring viral infections and population health.
Oikarinen has been involved in several large national and international research programmes and has served as principal investigator, consortium leader and work-package leader. Since 2020, he has secured more than €8 million in competitive research funding in PI and leadership roles.
In addition to wastewater viromics, Oikarinen’s research interests include viral infections and immune-mediated diseases, particularly the potential role of enteroviruses and other viral infections in the development of type 1 diabetes. He has contributed to major international birth-cohort and clinical studies, including the TEDDY, TRIGR and DIPP studies, as well as vaccine and infection surveillance programmes. This work has provided a foundation for his broader interest in understanding how viral exposure, infection dynamics and host susceptibility contribute to disease development.
A central goal of Oikarinen’s current research is to develop a predictive and precision-based framework for infectious diseases by integrating information on environmental infection pressure, population susceptibility, host responses and clinical outcomes. By connecting population-level environmental surveillance with individual and clinical health data, his research aims to improve the prediction of infection risks and ultimately support more effective prevention and control of both infectious and infection-associated chronic diseases. This work contributes to the broader concept of P4 medicine, aiming to move from reactive treatment towards predictive, preventive, personalized and participatory approaches to health.
Oikarinen has supervised undergraduate, master’s and doctoral students and leads a multidisciplinary research team combining virology, epidemiology, sequencing technologies, metagenomics and computational biology. He is involved in national and international research collaborations and doctoral training networks, and actively contributes to the development of the next generation of researchers in virology and infectious disease research.
His overall research vision is to use viruses as measurable indicators of population health and environmental change and to integrate virological, genomic and health data to improve the prediction, prevention and control of infectious and chronic diseases. By linking environmental signals with population susceptibility, host responses and clinical outcomes, he aims to develop new approaches for understanding disease dynamics and moving towards more predictive and preventive healthcare.