Job opportunities

We are always glad to hear from students and researchers at any stage. If you are interested in coloration, evolution, genomics, development or tropical fish, and you would like to join a young and international team, write to Claudius at . A short CV and a few lines about the question you want to answer are enough to start.

How people join us. The positions funded by our own grants are filled at the moment, so the route in is a fellowship or a grant of your own, and we are glad to help you develop the idea and write the application. Your topic should sit somewhere within the themes of the lab, but we are open to ideas that arrive from an unexpected direction. To see what those themes are, look at our and our . The routes we have used before are listed further down this page.

If you are applying for a fellowship, get in touch early. These applications take longer to prepare than people expect, so please write at least three months before the deadline. A good one needs a project we have shaped together, not a letter of support added at the end.

Where people go next. Postdocs who have left us have gone on to competitive fellowships and good positions. Two now run or will run their own groups, one on a Research Council of Finland Fellowship and one on an SNSF Ambizione fellowship, and one held a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship here before moving to Harvard Medical School. Twelve former master's students and interns are now doctoral researchers, in Helsinki and at universities from Gothenburg and Melbourne to Virginia.

What it is like here. In the 2025 University of Helsinki Well-being at Work survey the group scored 4.38 out of 5 overall, against 3.93 for the university, and 4.83 for the supervisor, against 4.11. Ask the people who work here, and the people who used to. They are on the , alumni included.

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The group belongs to two places at once: the <a href="/en/hilife-institute-of-biotechnology">Institute of Biotechnology</a>, a research unit of the <a href="/en/hilife-helsinki-institute-life-science">Helsinki Institute of Life Science (HiLIFE)</a>, and the <a href="/en/faculty-biological-and-environmental-sciences/research/organismal-and-evolutionary-biology-research-programme">Organismal and Evolutionary Biology</a> research programme in the <a href="/en/faculty-biological-and-environmental-sciences">Faculty of Biological and Environmental Sciences</a>.
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That is a large part of the reason to come here. One side brings facilities for imaging, genomics and single-cell work, and colleagues who work on cells and genomes; the other brings evolutionary biologists, a large community of ecologists and evolutionary geneticists, and students. We also run a tropical fish facility of our own. Not many places let you move between the two without leaving the campus.
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That campus is <a href="/en/viikki-campus">Viikki</a>, about 10 km and half an hour by bus from the centre of Helsinki, next to the Vanhankaupunginlahti nature reserve and the University arboretum.
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Helsinki is consistently ranked among the most livable cities in the world: modern, clean and lively, on the sea, with good architecture and a great deal of forest and park inside the city itself. Finland has topped the World Happiness Report every year since 2018. It is a member of the EU, almost everyone speaks English, schooling is free and of high quality, family benefits are generous and healthcare is excellent.

Finland is the most forested country in Europe, with about three quarters of its land under trees, and it has some of the cleanest air in the world. It is called the land of a thousand lakes, which undersells it by a factor of roughly two hundred. The seasons are a real contrast: long bright summers, and cold snowy winters that bring the northern lights, winter sports and the sauna, which UNESCO lists as intangible cultural heritage. Come and see for yourself.

There are many external funding routes in Finland and across Europe for students and researchers. Most of them bring more than money: a network, a cohort and a line on a CV that travels. We are happy to help you shape the idea, host you at the Institute of Biotechnology, and support the project once it starts.

These routes have worked for us before. Members of the lab have come on Marie Skłodowska-Curie and EMBO postdoctoral fellowships, on university-funded doctoral researcher positions, and on Erasmus+ traineeships — so the applications below are ones we have written and won, not a list copied from a funder's website.

Master's students. , if you are enrolled at a European university — your own institution runs the application, so start there. Many countries also fund their own students to work abroad, and those schemes are usually the quickest route for a short stay. If you find one, write to us and we will help with the host side.

Doctoral researchers. , which are salaried, with one application round a year; working grants; PhD fellowships; and and foundation grants.

Postdoctoral researchers. ; ; ; and postdoctoral funding.

lists every open research funding call in Finland, public and private, in one place.