Ville Mustonen has a background in engineering and physics and he has been working in the field of quantitative biology for the last ten years. He is currently group leader at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Hinxton. His group develops computational methods to discover and understand functionally relevant genetic and phenotypic variation. His research focuses on rapidly evolving populations in order to better understand how they react to external challenges. The work is done with systems of direct relevance to human health, in the context of cancer, infectious disease and evolution of drug resistance.