Veli Mäkinen finished his PhD studies in computer science in 2003 at the University of Helsinki.
After that he has mainly worked in research projects funded by the Academy of Finland, 
as Postdoctoral Research Fellow (2005-2007) and Academy Research Fellow (2007-20010). 
Academic year 2004-2005 he worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher at Bielefeld University / Center for Biotechnology, 
Germany. In 2010, he was appointed as a Professor in computer science at the University of Helsinki 
with the specialization area of data analysis and computational modeling of biological systems.
He is currently Director of Master's Programme in Computer Science.

Veli Mäkinen heads the Genome-scale algorithmics research group that belongs to the 
Center of Excellence in Cancer Genetics Research. Postdocs mentored in the research group have received several competitive grants from the Academy of Finland. In addition to successful postdoc mentoring, Veli Mäkinen has supervised 3 PhD theses and is currently supervising 3.

Veli Mäkinen started his career in string algorithms and compressed data structures. As of 2017, he has some 100 publications on these and related topics, with the focus being shifted towards algorithmic bioinformatics, where different high-throughput sequencing data analysis scenarios make near-linear time algorithms that work in small space an appealing target of study. Inspired by this new angle to bioinformatics algorithms, Veli Mäkinen co-authored a textbook on Genome-scale Algorithm Design: Biological Sequence Analysis in the Era of High-Throughput Sequencing, published by Cambridge University Press, 2015.

The new textbook works as the main material for two algorithmic bioinformatics courses taught frequently by Veli Mäkinen. He also teaches the Algorithms study track course Design and Analysis of Algorithms and occasionally courses, projects, and seminars e.g. on data compression and string processing.

Some current research interests include studying algorithms and computational complexity when moving from sequences to variation graphs in (pan-)genomics, and studying further applications of the remarkably versatile suffix-link tree iteration provided by special Burrows-Wheeler transform -based indexes.  

Besides research and teaching, Veli Mäkinen has an active role in the research community. Some recent activieties include co-chairing IWOCA 2016 and guest editing a special issue for Theory of Computing Systems, program committee memberships (RECOMB 2017, ECCB 2016, MFCS 2016, WABI 2016-2017), and keynote talks at the ECCB 2016 workshop on Computational Pan-Genomics and at the HiTSeq COSI track if ISMB/ECCB 2017.