Katariina Salmela-Aro is a Academy professor, a doctor of psychology and a professor of educational sciences in University of Helsinki. She is Past President of the European Association for Developmental Psychology, and previous Secretary General of International Society for the Study of Behavioural Development (ISSBD) and expert in OECD Education2030. Salmela-Aro studies the impact of climate change and the coronavirus on young people’s wellbeing both in Finland and internationally. Her key research themes are school engagement, burnout, optimal learning moments, experience sampling method, life-span model of motivation and related interventions.
Link to Katariina Salmela-Aro's profile.
Link to University of Helsinki page about Academy Professors.
Katja Upadyaya, Ph.D., Docent of educational psychology, is a researcher at the Faculty of Educational Sciences, University of Helsinki, Finland. Her research interests include student engagement, academic motivation research methodology, and lifelong learning. She is also interested in conducting research on teacher-student and parent-child interaction, and teachers’ and school principals’ well-being. Currently she is conducting research on students’ situational experiences while learning, academic emotions, and optimal learning moments.
Lauri Hietajärvi is a postdoctoral researcher in educational psychology at the Faculty of Educational Sciences, specialising in advanced statistical methods. He has been working with various cross-sectional and longitudinal datasets utilizing several statistical methods, including between and within-person variable- and person-oriented approaches. Lauri is primarily interested in studying adolescents’ academic wellbeing and digital media. He is also interested in general issues of study and work-related motivation and wellbeing.
Rasmus Mannerström is a postdoctoral researcher at the Faculty of Educational Sciences. His main research focus is currently on the longitudinal interrelationships between personal/social identity issues, wellbeing, gender and socioeconomic status in adolescence and young adulthood. Rasmus has also studied political values, ideology and engagement among young adults. Furthermore he has a keen interest in qualitative research on identity issues, questions ranging from nationalism and xenophobia to career choice-discourses and representations of femininity and masculinity on social media.
Junlin is a postdoctoral researcher interested in students’ motivation. His research focuses on (1) the development and impact of students’ mindsets and goals, as well as (2) the role of social identities such as gender in shaping students’ motivation and achievement.
Toyama Hiroyuki is a postdoctoral researcher. The field of his expertise is work and organizational psychology and occupational health psychology. His current research focuses on workers’ self-regulatory ability. Especially, he is curious about understanding how workers’ job crafting affects well-being outcomes.
Janica Vinni-Laakso is a PhD cadidate drived by the question why some students thrive at school and others do not, and what can we do to enhance student motivation and wellbeing in schools across educational levels. She is interested in developmental perspectives and uses various longitudinal data sets to examine students' motivation, and future educational and occupational aspirations. She is also keen on learning statistical methods, and utilize between and within -level person and variable -oriented approaches.
Jussi Järvinen is a doctoral researcher at the Faculty of Education. His research interests include students' motivation, well-being and situational learning-related experiences. His PHD research focuses on situational engagement, motivation and emotions.
Erika Maksniemi is a PHD Candidate at the Faculty of Educational Sciences, University of Helsinki. Her educational background is in educational psychology and she is a class teacher as well as subject matter teacher in health education. Her PHD research focuses on adolescents and wellbeing in the digital age. She is especially interested in different socio-digital practices, sleep behavior and academic wellbeing of adolescents and how these are intertwined in the daily level as well as in the longer period. She is using multidimensional datasets that combine longitudinal self-report questionnaire data as well as physiologically measured daily activity data.
Kati Puukko is a social psychologist and PhD researcher in the Department of Educational Sciences at the University of Helsinki. She is specialized on topics related to children and family wellbeing, adolescent development, parenting and media psychology. Her PhD project deals with the impacts of ICT use and digital skills on children's psychosocial well-being and development. She is currently working in interdisciplinary research projects where the aim is to facilitate sustainable personal, social, and institutional renewal in the digital age.
Salla is a doctoral researcher keen on exploring social aspects of climate change. Her main interest lies in climate change's influences on people's well-being and mental health. She is driven by the questions: 1) What kind of coping mechanisms individuals use to cope with distress and anxiety caused by climate change; 2) What is the relation between climate change related well-being and pro-environmental behavior; and 3) how can we support individuals' well-being and encourage them to act against climate change at the same time. Salla is mainly working in interdisciplinary research projects where focus is on quantitative and longitudinal data.
Anne is a school psychologist and a PhD candidate, who is interested in adolescent academic well-being. Her research focuses on personal resources like beneficial stress mindset and academic buoyancy and their relations to school engagement and burnout. She studies light touch interventions that could be utilized in preventive student welfare services.
Inka Ronkainen is a doctoral researcher. Her research interest are student motivation in multidisciplinary teaching and climate education. Her PhD studies how gender, expectancies, the self-concept of ability, values and experienced emotional cost affect motivation in the multidisciplinary climate education, and to what kind of learners these multidisciplinary modules are the most suitable, and which tasks in these modules are most motivating. She uses quantitative data, mainly cross-sectional student questionnaires and experience sampling method (ESM) data, with person-oriented and situational approaches.
Yirou Fang is a doctoral researcher in developmental psychology and gender study at the Faculty of Educational Sciences, University of Helsinki. Her interests include learning, human development, and gender study. She is curious about how people of different gender experience wellbeing-related setbacks at work place differently. She has received a fellowship from Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Innovative Training Network program and is currently working on her new project about gender, career, and wellbeing.
Kezia Olive is a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Educational Sciences, University of Helsinki. She received a fellowship from Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Innovative Training Networks program to study gendered pathways to STEM aspiration in adolescent students. That being said, she is especially interested in development of subjective task values, its manifestation in school engagement, the effect of gender and how it affects long-term aspiration. She is going to use the longitudinal dataset of elementary school and adolescent students and experience sampling data.
Lotta Allemand is a doctoral researcher in the Department of Educational Sciences at the University of Helsinki. She is interested in students’, teachers’, and parents’ well-being and teacher-student and teacher-parent interaction. She is also interested in conducting research on preventive and promotive interventions that aim to enhance students’ well-being. Her PhD research focuses on Let’s Talk about Children intervention in a school context.
Johannes Gale is a research assistant and a Master’s student at the Faculty of Education. He is aspiring to become a doctoral researcher after his graduation in the spring of 2023. His research interests are student motivation and well-being.