Donnelly Centre faculty member Mikko Taipale promoted to Professor

Mikko Taipale, Canada Research Chair in Functional Proteomics and Proteostasis and Anne and Max Tanenbaum Chair in Biomedical Research at U of T, has been promoted from associate professor to professor as of July 1, 2025.

Taipale joined the Donnelly Centre as an assistant professor of molecular genetics in 2014, after working at the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts as a postdoctoral research fellow for seven years. As a new faculty member, Taipale decided to take a unique approach to establishing his lab by dedicating his first five years to launching ambitious, long-term projects that would not see immediate results. While new faculty members may typically aim to publish papers early and often to attract lab members and funding opportunities, Taipale would not start to publish his lab’s research until 2020. At this point, he was promoted to associate professor and earned tenure.

“On behalf of the Donnelly Centre community, I extend my heartfelt congratulations to Mikko for this milestone in his career,” said Stéphane Angers, professor and director of the Donnelly Centre. “We have been lucky to have him on our faculty for a decade now, during which he has made significant breakthroughs across a wide range of areas within biomedical research. I look forward to seeing how he will push the envelope even further in the years to come to improve outcomes in health and medicine.”

While the Donnelly Centre had only been established for around 10 years at the time Taipale had joined its faculty, the reputation of its researchers preceded it, drawing in international talent as a global hub of functional genomics and large-scale approaches to biology. The facility and community perfectly suited Taipale’s research interests and values, and he found himself feeling at home rather quickly among like-minded scientists. He did not experience pressure to complete short-term projects for fast results early on in his career because he was surrounded by other researchers who also prioritized innovation and impact.

Taipale decided to join the Donnelly Centre after meeting a number of its faculty members, including Brenda Andrews, Charles Boone, Andrew Fraser, Timothy Hughes and Igor Stagljar, at conferences while he was a postdoctoral fellow. He appreciated their approaches to science and could already imagine them as his colleagues. His connections to faculty members solidified his impression of the Donnelly Centre being one of the best places in the world to do biomedical research.

Taipale has been able to maintain his vision for conducting large-scale, long-term projects throughout his time at the Donnelly Centre. His lab encourages this impact-driven research through the exploration of diverse aspects of proteomics, functional genomics and technology development. Taipale insists on his lab not focusing on a particular disease, pathway or model to take full advantage of his academic freedom and learn about the many aspects of biology that interest him.

While his lab members work on different projects, and even different topics, what brings them all together are the approaches they take to answer their research questions. These approaches focus on high-throughput screens that offer a wider perspective than hypothesis-driven projects. Taipale’s trainees share similar research methods, but each one works independently on their own projects and becomes the lab expert on particular topics.

Since being promoted to associate professor around five years ago, Taipale and his lab now have many high-impact publications under their belt. Taipale, however, finds greater pleasure in tracing the trajectory of his lab’s collective research from a decade ago to now than in counting his publications.

The lack of predictability in research is what drew him into science in the first place. Some of the lab’s projects have been left behind over the years, while new ones are currently launching through collaborations with other faculty members at the Donnelly Centre. Taipale hopes he will be just as surprised at the changes his lab undergoes in another 10 years.

“Scientific discovery is the most important thing,” said Taipale. “Seeing my trainees learn, thrive and achieve things they didn’t even dare to achieve before is just as important as any other aspect of being a faculty member. Seeing them develop as scientists—I get a l lot of pleasure from that.”

Taipale is grateful to have secured full professorship, considering what the process entails; a committee reviews reference letters from the applicant’s colleagues, which must demonstrate that the applicant has contributed to science in a meaningful way. Applicants must be accomplished at the international level and considered to be leaders in their field.

“It feels good, like I did something right,” said Taipale. “The world-leading scientists who wrote letters on my behalf felt I was worth the recognition, which is humbling. But I really don’t care about titles in science, they don’t change anything. What’s much more important than the title before our names is what we actually do.”