Hannele Ruohola-Baker is a professor of biochemistry and associate director at UW Institute for Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine (ISCRM). She is also the adjunct professor in the department of biology and genome sciences. She started her faculty career at the University of Washington in 1993 and became a full professor in 2004.

Ruohola-Baker's research focuses on stem cells and the molecular requirements for differentiation, with particular interest in the role of microRNA and in the relationship between metabolism and epigenetic changes in different types of stem cells. The research group also has a long-standing interest in studying the Notch and S1P signaling pathway using Drosophila as models of human diseases, particularly Duchenne muscular dystrophy and cancer.

She received her bachelor's and master's degree from the University of Helsinki and received her Ph.D. in cell biology from Yale University. She then moved to a visiting fellowship at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and subsequently to a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, San Francisco