FAQ

We appreciate your interest in joining our research group for doctoral studies and commend your motivation to pursue an academic career.

In the Finnish academic system, however, an acceptance letter from a research group does not grant doctoral study rights, nor does it provide funding, salary, or research resources. For this reason, we kindly ask prospective applicants not to contact us requesting acceptance letters.

Doctoral study rights at the University of Helsinki are granted through the relevant . Each doctoral school runs its own admissions process, typically four times per year (although schedules may vary). Successful admission provides you with the formal right to pursue doctoral studies, but it does not include funding for salary, living expenses, or research costs. These must be applied for separately through competitive funding schemes.

We strongly encourage all applicants to carefully follow the official announcements, deadlines, and provided by the University of Helsinki and the relevant doctoral schools.

All salaried doctoral positions in our group are funded through internal or external grants. When positions become available, they are announced publicly on our group’s website and through official academic channels. If no such announcement is visible, it means that we currently do not have open positions or available funding to support new doctoral researchers.

The same principles outlined above also apply to postdoctoral positions. If there are no current announcements on our website, this means that we are not presently hiring and do not have funding available to open new postdoctoral positions. All postdoctoral appointments in our group depend on the availability of research funding.

You are welcome to send us your CV at any time; however, please note that submitting a CV does not imply or guarantee that a postdoctoral position will be offered. We may keep your information on file and, if a suitable opportunity arises, we may contact you if your expertise matches our needs. This reflects funding constraints rather than the quality of your academic profile.

If you are interested in applying for external postdoctoral funding (such as EMBO, MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships, Novo Nordisk Foundation grants, or similar schemes) and you have a project idea that aligns with our research, please carefully review the relevant guidelines and deadlines. We ask that you contact us at least 3–4 months before the application deadline, providing your CV, a brief project proposal, and the funding scheme you intend to apply for, so that we can assess the possibility of developing a joint application.

To ensure fairness and manageability, we consider only one application per funding scheme per year.

We are not currently recruiting trainees for summer positions. Any available opportunities will be announced on our website. Please note that this reflects limitations in available research funding and does not in any way reflect on your qualifications or expertise.

Research in our group primarily focuses on the generation and analysis of large-scale omics datasets. These include genome skimming and target-enrichment (e.g. A353) data from Illumina short-read sequencing, long-read sequencing (e.g., PacBio and Nanopore), optical mapping (e.g., Bionano), as well as occasional proteomic and transcriptomic datasets, together with species distribution data. The core of our work is therefore computational, relying heavily on bioinformatics and high-performance computing rather than routine wet-lab workflows.

Because much of our work involves museum specimens, which are often fragile and irreplaceable, destructive sampling is limited and can only be carried out by trained staff and members of the research group. As a result, we are unable to offer positions focused on large-scale laboratory processing such as high-throughput DNA/RNA extractions, PCRs, gel electrophoresis, or other traditional wet-lab activities. We also do not offer paid positions for such laboratory work.

However, we do welcome enquiries from applicants with strong computational and bioinformatics expertise. In particular, if you have experience with programming in Python, Julia, or R, and can carry out tasks such as target-enrichment assembly (e.g., using HybPiper), multi-species coalescent phylogenetic inference (e.g., with ASTRAL), genome assembly (e.g., SPAdes), admixture and gene-flow analyses, or Bayesian molecular-clock analyses (e.g., using BEAST or RevBayes), we encourage you to contact us.

We welcome visiting Bachelor’s, Master’s, and PhD students, as well as postdoctoral researchers and research staff, for both short- and long-term stays in our group. Please note, however, that we do not provide funding to cover travel, accommodation, or living expenses for visiting researchers or students.

Exchange students should be mindful of the of the University of Helsinki. During the Spring semester, we can typically host exchange students from January to May, but not during the summer break (June–August). During the Autumn semester, we are generally able to host exchange students from September to December, in line with the university’s teaching period.

Please also note that we are a research group rather than a student services office. For practical matters such as housing, study rights, ECTS credits, and course registration, we kindly ask you to contact the at
studentexchange@helsinki.fi.

If you have completed your Bachelor’s or Master’s degree and are seeking a paid Research Assistant position as a bridge toward a future PhD, please note that we are unable to offer such positions. We do not currently have open Research Assistant roles in our group.

Most of our fieldwork is conducted outside Finland and is funded through external research grants from international organizations or through commissioned projects, including those related to the European Union and CITES. Our PhD students and postdoctoral researchers typically support their own field activities through competitively awarded grants.

Bachelor’s and Master’s students are only rarely able to participate in these activities. In the past decade, however, we have coordinated or participated in several international education and training projects in Southeast Asia, India, Africa, and the Middle East that enabled student exchanges and fieldwork opportunities.

At present, our group is active in North and South America; however, the funding that supported student participation in these field courses concluded in 2025. Although we are actively seeking renewed funding, we regret that in 2026 we are unable to accept applications from undergraduate or graduate students for field-based courses or fieldwork participation.