Associate Professor Jarno Vanhatalo, the group leader of the Environmental and Ecological Statistics group and the deputy director of REC, has been promoted to a Full Professor of Statistics at the Faculty of Biological and Environmental Sciences and the Faculty of Science. Associate Professor Vanhatalo is a statistician specialised in the development of Bayes methods and computational solutions for the analysis of long-term datasets. His group conducts ecological and environmental change research, develops statistical methods for the analysis of ecological and environmental data, and supports environmental management and decision-making.
Associate Professor Marjo Saastamoinen will begin as a Full Professor of Evolutionary Biology at the Faculty of Biological and Environmental Sciences. She is an evolutionary biologist who specialises in the stress biology of wild species. Associate Professor Saastamoinen is the group leader of the Life-History Evolution research group that aims to understand the processes and underlying genetic mechanisms shaping intraspecific life history variation in the wild, concentrating particularly on how organisms cope with environmental variation in nature.
The promotion news was celebrated with flowers and a celebratory toast with colleagues. Associate Professors Saastamoinen and Vanhatalo begin their full professorships in June and September, respectively.