Professor Liisa Lehtonen, MD, is the Director of the Division of Neonatology at Turku University Hospital in Turku, Finland. Her interest is to find out care strategies protecting brain development and, thereby, optimizing the longterm developmental outcomes of preterm infants. She leads a multidisciplinary   follow up study PIPARI (2001-currently) which follows 232 very preterm infants and their controls until 17 years of age (www.utu.fi/pipari). The research on the implementation and evaluation of the Close Collaboration with Parents training program provides knowledge on how parents’ presence and involvement in infant care can be supported in neonatal intensive care units and how parent-infant closeness affects child, parent and staff outcomes. The Close Collaboration with Parents training program has so far been implemented in 26 NICUs and 6 departments of obstetrics in 8 countries. In addition, she studies the effects of parents’ verbal contact with their infants. Professor Lehtonen has also led the PERFECT Preterm Study which showed the benefits of centralizing very preterm births to level III hospitals. This knowledge has been implemented in practice in Finland. She continues register studies as a part of iNeo Research group led from Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, Canada.

Professor Lehtonen has an active role in developing competency-based medical specialist training in Finland.

Professor Liisa Lehtonen has got her post-doc training at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, and at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. She is an Associate Editor in Acta Paediatrica (since 2010-currently).