People

Following the completion of my PhD (2017, Imperial College London), I completed postdocs in Germany (iDiv, 2016-2020), the UK (Natural History Museum, 2021), and a Global Maria Curie Fellowship (2021-2023, hosted by Netherlands Institute of Ecology with secondment at Saint Mary’s University, Canada).

My passion is using big datasets to answer ecological questions at large scales. I have a soft spot in my heart for the humble earthworm, and so have been focusing on them in recent years. There is a wealth of knowledge about earthworms at species-, community- and regional- levels, which allows plenty of interesting analyses to be done.

I am passionate about building, curating and analysing comprehensive datasets of traits across different taxonomic groups to answer questions about their global distribution and evolutionary history.  As part of my postdoc here in Helsinki, I will be assessing variation in life-history traits in earthworms and examine whether species that successfully invade new habitats share a specific trait profile, such as high fecundity and continuous breeding.

Most recently, I was a postdoc for the PARADIVE team at the University of Warsaw (Poland) where I mapped change in parasite diversity throughout Holocene using information from parasite finds in archaeological literature.

As part of my PhD at the University of St Andrews (UK), I used a range of phylogenetic comparative methods to investigate the evolution of parental care and associated life-history traits in passerines and teleosts, with a particular focus on nest-building.

I entered my studies with the desire to help animals and biodiversity in the world. During my studies at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (in Uppsala and Umeå), I became interested in the data component of science. My Master’s thesis sparked a special interest in spatio-temporal analysis. Now I can combine the two by analysing diversity of the earthworm in time and space.