Kari Kuulasmaa is a research professor emeritus at the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare. After a master's degree in Jyväskylä, Finland, he got the Diploma in Mathematical Statistics at the University of Cambridge, UK, and did PhD at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh on stochastic processes, inspired by the spread of rabies in the red fox population. In 1984, he joined the Data Centre of the WHO MONICA (Multinational MONItoring of trends and determinants in cardiovascular disease) Project at the National Public Health Institute of Finland, and was the Head since 1987. Since 1998, he is the Head of the Data Centre of the MORGAM (MONICA Risk, Genetics, Archiving and Monograph) Study, which has harmonized data from large population based cohort studies for collaborative research. From 1999 to 2012 he also led several EU-funded projects on the EHES (European Health Examination Survey) initiative for standardizing national health examination surveys of the European countries.