You are Australian-born but living and working in Finland – how did you end up on the other side of the world?
I have now lived in Finland longer than in Australia, already for almost 28 years. I also have both citizenships – Australian and Finnish, so I consider myself as much Finnish as Australian.
After completing my undergraduate degree in Melbourne, Australia I was working as a lab technician focusing on developing genetic parentage testing systems for dogs, race horses and ostriches.
My moving to Finland happened a little bit by chance, and via an important detour in Sweden. Already during my undergraduate degree, I was interested in the genetics of wildlife and natural species, but there were no opportunities to do that in Australia, so after writing a lot of letters around the world (no email in those days), I got a position as research assistant in Sweden to work on wild bird genetics. After one year this turned into a PhD position, which I completed at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Uppsala in 1997.
Very soon after arriving in Sweden, I met my future wife, a Finn, who was an exchange student in Sweden at the time. After three years of a long-distance relationship across the Baltic Sea, as soon as I finished my PhD I got a post-doc position at the University of Helsinki to study fish genetics. Long story short; we have now been married for almost 28 years, and have two adult children. Great societal conditions for raising a multilingual family combined with continuous positions and research funding have made it an easy choice to stay.
You and your family also spent 12 years in Turku?
I first managed to get an Academy researcher position so that I could start my own research group, to continue working on fish and bird evolutionary genetics at the University of Helsinki. Six months before that project was ending, I got an offer for a professorship in genetics at the University of Turku in 2005, and we moved there. I returned to University of Helsinki again in 2017 for my current professorship of genomics.
How has your being an immigrant affected your career at the University?
I think things are very different now compared to what they were when I first arrived as a postdoc. At the time, there was only one other international person in the whole department. So, we were considered quite novel cases. And I reckon the general thinking was that we wouldn't be around for long and we’d probably go somewhere else. The situation is very different now that more than 50% of the PhD students and postdocs in our Faculty originate from somewhere else than Finland.
There was a period in Finnish academia when there was no tenure track positions available, which made it quite challenging to find a suitable position. However, I slowly started learned the language –it took about three years, including several evening courses, to be having basic conversations, and then 4-5 years to be using Finnish professionally at work, and finally after eight years of living in Finland I started giving my first teaching lectures in Finnish. All these milestones took about twice as long to reach as what they took when I learned Swedish during my PhD. But now I can say that I have given lectures on molecular evolution in English, Swedish and Finnish.
How to enhance new arrivals learning the Finnish language is something that I think we as a University have to start thinking about more carefully and about how we are able to support particularly for example, people from elsewhere that are hired to tenure track positions. Are we providing them with the time and the resources so that that is possible? And that it is not just adding ‘learn Finnish’ on top of the standard requirements for getting tenure in terms of research and teaching. We need to lighten the load in such cases if we, as a University, view learning Finnish as important.
Even if the official administrative language is Finnish or Swedish, I still think the University of Helsinki is a front runner in changing that and being flexible in three languages. This enables the non-Finnish researchers to participate in the decision-making bodies at the University. For example, I have attended many meetings and workshops where some people speak Finnish, some Swedish, and some English, while in other cases, for example our Faculty Council, we now hold meetings in English.
What is your vision for the future of the organization?
My main vision is that we as a Faculty can help to achieve the aims of the University's strategy through having improved efficiency and work life balance, which will lead us to healthy and sustainable high performance. There are undoubtedly some challenges that we face, one of which is the need to be increasing our student intake and speeding up the flow of students from when they start to when they when they get their degrees, which is an aim of the Ministry of Education and Culture. At the same time, we should be trying to also at least maintain, and ideally further improve, our research achievements. So, this I think requires some thinking about how we can almost achieve the impossible and be improving all of these different things. But we have a lot of very motivated and clever people in the Faculty, so I am confident we can find ways for making this possible.
How would you describe your leadership style?
My three key leadership principles are, firstly, ambition, meaning working towards the Faculty and the University being the best that they can be. A more concrete aim is that I believe the University can be one of the top non-fee charging universities in the world. So, I think we should not worry about being in the top 100 universities in the world, but rather be comparing ourselves with universities that do not charge huge tuition fees for all of their students. As a Dean, I want the fields that our Faculty covers to be leading by example, which we indeed are. For example, Helsinki Ecology is ranked 12th in the world.
The second key leadership principle is trust and respect. We need to have mutual trust and respect at many different levels, not just within the Faculty but within the University. This is particularly important for supporting diversity and multidisciplinarity. Certainly, a Dean has to have appreciation and respect for disciplines other than their own, and I hope that we are able to transfer this principle throughout our work community at the University.
My third key leadership principle is transparency and communication. A really important factor for maintaining motivation in the work community is that people feel that they are heard, and they have the possibility to influence decisions. So, we aim to be transparent about the decisions that are being made and hear a diverse range of opinions before making them.
I try to apply a combination of coaching and team based leadership approaches, aiming to provide a healthy working environment for each person to enable them to succeed in research and education. I aim to inspire everybody to try and contribute to the different teams we represent, be it their research group, their research program or the Faculty, and also the University. So, we really want that all of the supervisors in the Faculty are able to encourage people to have both collective goals, but also support the individual goals that their team members have via this team-based style of leadership.
What are your top priorities and goals for the first 100 days in your new role?
The first months will include adjusting to the new role. Not just myself, but also helping four new vice Deans to ease into their roles. We have a complete change of the Dean team, as I've been calling them, because a number of the previous vice Deans are ending or close to ending their second term and several of them are retiring before the end of the year. Our first primary area of focus will be finalising the revision of the degree program curricula that the degree program steering boards have been working on for some time now. The aim is for them to be suitable for having a larger intake, and smoother flow through of students. The new four-year curriculum has to be close to finalized by June so that there is time for feedback and final approval so it can be implemented in 9/2026. So, that will be a main area of focus in the 1st 100 days.
At the same time there are also big changes in doctoral education that are happening on a similar schedule, so that also needs to be finalized in the next 100 days, as does our Faculty’s research assessment material.
And sounds like there will be more communications also in your plan?
Yes, I think that communication within the Faculty is really important and that's something that we hope to be able to work on right away too.
A key thing I will be trying to communicate to Faculty members is that we should try to respect our own time. A common theme in many of the discussions that we've had is that researchers feel that time is their most limited resource. So, we have to focus on how to do things more efficiently, meaning we should aim to use less time to achieve the same or even higher output, which can help us to achieve our targets in research and teaching, and also retain good work life balance. As a part of this, we will be assessing the number of different committees and working groups that we have within the Faculty as well as their roles and meeting frequency. More generally, we will also aim to communicate the importance of considering the efficiency of every single meeting, and whether instead of having a one hour meeting, it could be 45 or 30 minutes, or does it need to be a meeting at all? All of these actions can hopefully contribute to respecting both our own time as well as others, and thereby free up more time for other things.
What motivates you in your professional life?
Like many biologists, I've always been interested in understanding how the living world works. And then obviously teaching the new generations of students about science is another key motivation. I've been lucky enough to have funding to be able to do that in my own research field, specifically the genetics of wild species and how they adapt to their local environments, and the molecular processes associated with local adaptation, and the genetics of the adaptive traits themselves.
And now, in this new leadership position, my aim is to provide a work environment so that others in the Faculty have the possibility to be curious and to find out new things about biological and environmental phenomena, so they can be as excited about research as I have been.
Can you share a piece of advice that has been particularly valuable to you in your career?
Key advice I like to give to others about planning research projects is to hope for the best, but plan for the worst i.e. there should always be a Plan B, and maybe also C and D. While that may be optimistically pessimistic, more optimistic advice worth following is to always have a bottle of sparkling wine in the fridge in case there is something to celebrate. We deal with a lot of rejection in academia, such as grant applications and manuscript peer reviews, so it is important to celebrate the successes when they happen, no matter how large or small.
How do you spend your free time?
Most of my free time is spent with my wife Eeva Primmer (Finnish Environment Institute (SYKE) Research Director) and our children if they happen to be in town.
Beyond that, sport, both playing and watching, has always had an important role in my life. My main sport when I was younger was Australian rules football, which included playing at A-junior level in Australia, and then starting a team in Finland. It's a mix of rugby, soccer and basketball and is very fast-paced and physical. Since I've become too old to play, I have “enjoyed” different endurance sports such as triathlon and marathon running. I find long jogs to be a great time to zone out and plan a research project, manuscript introduction, or meeting agenda. I also like to see live bands, and I try to attend at least one rock festival a year, if not more. A particular favourite band of late is The Chats, an Australian punk band who sing about e.g. being broke or about hot weather.