Pia Österlund holds MD, PhD and educational degrees from the Medical and University Pedagogy Faculty at University of Helsinki, Finland. She is consultant at Tampere University Hospital, Department of Oncology since September 2016. Before that she worked 20 years at Helsinki University Hospital Cancer Centre of Excellence and still works part-time there as researcher and study physician. She is married and has four children.

Dr Österlund was registered as a medical doctor in 1993 both in Finland and in Great Britain. She became board certified as a clinical oncologist (medical and radiation oncologist) in 2004, having trained at St Luke´s Hospital Guildford Surrey and Helsinki University Cancer Centre of Excellence. She completed her PhD program on “Tolerability of raltitrexed and 5-fluorouracil chemotherapy in colorectal cancer patients” in 2004. Thereafter she worked as and medical oncologist and senior lecturer with part-time research responsibilities. In September 2014 she became docent (associate professor) at the medical faculty at Helsinki University. She currently serves as a supervisor for 4 PhD theses.

She is actively involved in clinical and translational research with molecular targeted therapies. One of the main objectives of her research group is to identify new predictive markers of response to diverse treatments and to identify markers of toxicity and efficacy. She has been principal investigator for national and multinational phase I-III studies. For the past 20 years, she has performed unique clinical studies combining nutritional therapy, microbiology, tumour markers and immunologic studies to understand the mechanisms of toxicity and relieve adverse events during medical treatment of gastrointestinal cancer.

Dr Österlund is a member of the Educational Board, Global Curriculum Working Group and Consensus guideline committee of the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) and she is previous member of the Young Oncologists Committee and the Membership and National Representatives committee. She is also member of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), the European society of digestive oncology (ESDO), the European Society for clinical nutrition and metabolism (ESPEN) and the Nordic biomodulation group. She is actively involved in (inter)national editorial boards and as a referee for distinguished journals and is PI for the Finnish colorectal study group and steering committee member for the Finnish GI-cancer group. She has (co)authored more than 80 peer-reviewed papers and educational books.