Onnela earned his International Baccalaureate from the United World College of the Atlantic. He earned his M.Sc. in computational science from the Helsinki University of Technology (now Aalto University) in 2002. He obtained his D.Sc. there in network science in 2006, and his doctoral dissertation, titled Complex Networks in the Study of Financial and Social Systems, received dissertation of the year award from the university. He subsequently spent two years at the University of Oxford as a Junior Research Fellow, a year at the Harvard Kennedy School as a Fulbright Visiting Scholar, and two years as a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard Medical School. Onnela joined the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health at Harvard University in 2011 as Assistant Professor of Biostatistics, where he runs a research group that focuses on statistical network science and digital phenotyping, where his group has defined the latter as the “moment-by-moment quantification of the individual-level human phenotype in situ using data from personal digital devices,” in particular smartphones. He was awarded a U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director’s New Innovator Award in 2013 for his work in digital phenotyping.[4] His lab has developed the Beiwe platform for high-throughput smartphone-based digital phenotyping.