People

Tuomas Aivelo is disease ecologist and evolutionary parasitologist. He has studied both small mammals and their pathogen vectors and developed new methods for identifying parasites and study their co-occurrences within host individuals. He defended his PhD thesis "Longitudinal monitoring of parasites in individual wild primates" in University of Helsinki in 2015 and then did his first postdoctoral project with tick microbiota in Barbara Tschirren's group in University of Zürich, Switzerland.

Tuomas leads the ecological and educational parts of the project and tries his best to coordinate multidisciplinary work. He openly admits that rats were not his first choice of study species. He tried to get funding to study bat viruses, but couple of years ago that was quite marginal study area. "I've grown fond of rats and see continuing this project for a long time", he's known to sigh if you give him a glass of wine or two. 

Saiki Lucy Cheah has worked as a course instructor and visiting researcher at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Helsinki. She has designed courses utilising the community of philosophical inquiry pedagogy to create interdisciplinary and transformative learning experiences, especially for postgraduate students in environmental and educational sciences. Her research focuses on environmental citizenship education, transformative learning and teaching, and comparative studies of environmental education in the Nordic countries.
In the Ratholes Environmental Citizenship Research Project, Cheah critically examines our understanding of waste, representations of waste citizenship, and their implications for urban residents' behaviours. She is particularly enthusiastic about exploring with her research partners the intentions of urban residents’ recycling behaviour and the related challenges, such as information acquisition and habit formation

Saiki Lucy holds a PhD in Political Theory from LUISS Guido Carlo University, EdM in Philosophy and Education from Teachers College Columbia University, and MA in Philosophy of Social Science specialised in Comparative and International Education from Stockholm University.

Maija Kalm-Akubardia (MA, PhD) completed her doctoral dissertation in social sciences at the University of Helsinki (2024), focusing on the dynamics between state power and the capabilities of undocumented individuals in the context of Moscow, Russia. She has developed and taught courses on migration, social sustainability, and sustainable wellbeing from an eco-social perspective at universities of applied sciences and universities.
In her resent research projects, she has explored the realization of social rights and the construction of trust. Maija’s research interests focus on power dynamics, the actual capabilities of different social groups, and the sustainability challenges tied to issues such as neocolonialism, the exploitation of human and natural resources, inequality, othering and societal polarization.

Marja Katisko works as a lecturer and researcher in social sciences at the University of Turku. She is also Associate Professor/Docent of Social Sciences at the University of Helsinki. Her research has focused on social and global phenomena, structures and marginalities. Her research has ranged from the study of transnational everyday life to the study of local and global marginalisation: radicalisation, forced migration and climate refugees.  She has also focused on the development of transformative pedagogies and teaching methods, as well as research on eco-social education and learning. She has extensive work experience as a researcher in interdisciplinary and international research projects with an emphasis on participatory research methodologies.

Karolina Lukasik is a postdoctoral researcher in the Helsinki Urban Rats Project, where she studies the conflicts between the gardeners and non-human animals in urban allotment gardens. She completed her PhD in psychology at Åbo Akademi University and then conducted postdoctoral research at SWPS University of Humanities and Social Sciences in Warsaw, Poland, in the project “Whom to trust? Cognitive determinants of learning from others”. She also graduated from the School of Ecopoetics, where she researched the history of laboratory rats. Karolina is especially passionate about the animals that we label as “pests” and building biocentric, multispecies communities.



 

Heta Lähdesmäki is a historian specializing in human-animal studies, human-wildlife conflicts and conservation. She completed a PhD in cultural history in 2020 at the University of Turku, studying human-wolf relations in 20th century Finland. After that, she has studied the relationship between humans and nature in Seili island in a multidisciplinary research project Seili - Elämän saari funded by the Kone Foundation and led by the Biodiversity unit at the University of Turku. She is part of the Academy of Finland funded HumBio-project, investigating the human relationship with the disappeared, endangered, introduced, and non-native as well as invasive marine animals and plants in Finland.

Heta joined Helsinki Urban Rat Project to study the history of bird feeding and rat conflicts in Helsinki. She is interested in multidisciplinary research and believes that historical knowledge is an important tool when tackling present-day environmental problems. The actual reason why she has taken into animal histories is that she has bad memory for names.

Juha Suonpää works as the principal lecturer of visual culture in the international Degree programme in Media and Arts at Tampere University of Applied Sciences. At the moment he is Senior Academy researcher and project manager in Finnish Academy CICAT2025 project. Juha belongs to a rare group of artists who has a title of docent in Art, Environmental and Nature Photography. Suonpää has exhibited internationally and published documentary films, including Wolf Man and upcoming Lynx Man, numerous academic monographs and researched, for example, topics related to photography, visualizing science and the construction of the identity of a place.

In HURP, Juha takes charge of bringing rats closer to the camera lens and consequently, rat presence closer to humans by means of visual documentation.

Virpi Väkkärä is an educational researcher who has worked for a long time in early-life environmental education. She is interested in multispecies storytelling and human-animal relations. She has joined HURP in 2021 to work with rodent control ethnographies, narratives and afefcts. She finished her PhD in University of Helsinki in multispecies education in 2022. 

Viktor Zöldi is an epidemiologist who is interested in rodent- and vector-borne pathogens and their public health relevance. He studied biology in Eötvös Loránd University and epidemiology in University of Debrecen. He completed his PhD at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Budapest, investigating a natural tick-borne encephalitis focus in Western Hungary. He completed the two-year European field epidemiology training (EPIET) program at the National Institute for Health and Welfare (THL) in Helsinki. Besides his scientific work, he has worked in biocidal product authorization for many years. Also, he has developed the current Rat Control Program for the City of Budapest.

Viktor joined the Helsinki Urban Rats Project in September 2023 as a Postdoctoral researcher to work on Academy of Finland funded project.

Moustapha Itani is a doctoral researcher specializing in interdisciplinary environmental research with a focus on socioecological systems. With a passion for project ideation and development, he thrives in collaborative settings, uniting diverse perspectives to create innovative solutions. His academic journey from Lebanon to Finland reflects his dedication to global and local conservation efforts and fostering cross-cultural dialogue. While his PhD bridges ecological sustainability, biodiversity, and pastoral governance, his broader research explores sustainable living and conflict resolution in multicultural urban as well as rural settings. Beyond his discipline, Moustapha has contributed to research in media, mental health, public health, and policy, highlighting his commitment to addressing complex societal challenges.

Santtu Pentikäinen joined the Helsinki Urban Rat Project in March 2020 to do his PhD on movement ecology and population dynamics of city rats. He is interested in finding out how various environmental and demographic factors and human actions, intended or accidental, can effect rat populations in urban areas. Santtu did his MSc in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology in University of Helsinki in 2019. In his thesis, he studied how captive breeding changes the behaviour of endangered steelhead trout, based on his work with wild and hatchery-reared steelhead in Oregon.

Anttoni Kervinen is an educational researcher, interested in how the interplay between students, teachers and multispecies environments can lead to doing and learning science in meaningful ways. He did his PhD in the University of Helsinki on outdoor learning and joined the Helsinki Urban Rat Project in 2021 as a visiting researcher from the University of Oulu working on CitiRats project. In addition to outdoor learning and multispecies encounters, his current research interests include learning from citizen science, the role of technology in learning and teacher professional development. 

Anttoni is not only qualified biology teacher but also qualified primary school teacher, who has a bad conscience of not really identifying those plant species.

Nina Nygren is a senior lecturer on sustainable development in the Häme University of Applied Sciences. She has studied urban human-wildlife relations and nature conservation conflicts. She has specialized in deliberative and participatory research and multidisciplinary cooperation.

Nina leads administrative science and environmental policy research in HURP. Rats in her own backyard have also forced her to try first time autoethnographical methods.