Jarno Vanhatalo

Background

Jarno Vanhatalo,
(D.Sc. tech) Assistant professor of statistics

I am an assistant professor of statistics at the Department of Mathematics and Statistics and the Department of Biosciences in University of Helsinki. This is a shared position including research and teaching activities in both departments and I am part of the Biostatistics group and the Research Centre for Ecological Change.

I lead the Environmental and Ecological Statistics group (see below). Currently, I am also a co-PI in the University of Helsinki node of the Joint Research Centre of Excellence for Arctic Shipping and Operations (CEARCTIC) and am involved in the SmartSea consortium in relation to analysing impacts of climate change to the Gulf of Bothnia. I am also one of the developers of the Gaussian processes modeling software GPstuff

My bibliographic information can be found, e.g., from Google Scholar, TUHAT research database, Scopus and my list of publications.

Environmental and Ecological Statistics research group

Environmental sciences includes a broad range of scientific fields studying the environment and solutions to environmental challenges. Ecology studies the distribution and abundance of species, and their interactions with other species and the environment. Statistical inference and uncertainty estimation are essential for both fields to ensure that appropriate conclusions and decisions can be reached from experiments and observations.

The Environmental and Ecological Statistics group (EnvStat) comprises of people from various backgrounds (e.g., statistics, biology, geography). We work in the departments of Mathematics and Statistics, Biosciences and Environmental Sciences at the University of Helsinki. Our research interests span from the theoretical and computational statistics to applied ecology and environmental risk assessment and management.

Our methodological research topics include hierarchical Bayesian modelling and decision analysis, spatial and spatio-temporal statistics, Gaussian processes, Bayesian optimization, optimal design of observational studies, computational statistics and machine learning. Our ecological and environmental research includes, among others, species distribution modeling, population and fisheries management, uncertainty assessment and data fusion with environmental simulators and environmental management and risk assessment problems related to Arctic shipping and oil transportation (CEARCTIC).

Group leader, Principal investigator

• Jarno Vanhatalo

Group members

• Jia Liu (post-doctoral researcher)
• Marcelo Hartmann (PhD student)
• Karel Kaurila
• Mikko Kotilainen (PhD student, Co-supervised by Pentti Kujala, affiliated in Aalto University)
• Jussi Mäkinen (PhD student)
• Maisa Nevalainen (PhD student)
• Torsti Schulz (PhD student, co-supervised by Marjo Saastamoinen)

Former group members

• MSc. Lauri Ronkainen
• Anja Wilken

Open positions

• There are several masters thesis projects related to Gaussian processes, Bayesian optimization, spatial(-temporal) statistics, species distribution modeling, population modeling etc. Ask for more information: jarno.vanhatal(a)helsinki.fi.

Our research is funded by