People

Professor of Plant Biodiversity, University of Helsinki

Office: 5616 (Biocenter 3)
E-mail: anna-liisa.laine@helsinki.fi

Anna-Liisa Laine is an evolutionary ecologist who specialises in interspecific interactions - especially pathogens and parasites - and epidemiology.

Associate Professor (tenure track) - Group Leader

Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Faculty of Science (Kumpula campus)
Organismal and Evolutionary Biology Research Program, Faculty of Bio- and Environmental Sciences (Viikki Kampus)

Office: D313 (Exactum building, Kumpula) and 5717 (Biocenter 3, Viikki)
E-mail: jarno.vanhatalo(a)helsinki.fi
Phone: +358 50 3175494

Jarno Vanhatalo is a statistician who specialises in developing Bayes methods and computational solutions to the analysis of long-term datasets.

SLU, Sweden, and University of Helsinki
Email: tomas.roslin@helsinki.fi

Professor Tomas Roslin is a community ecologist who specialises in the response of species communities to landcape fragmentation, Arctic environments and environmental change.

HiLIFE Associate Professor in Evolutionary Ecology

Office: 5715 (Biocenter 3)
E-mail: marjo.saastamoinen@helsinki.fi
Phone: + 358 50 448 4471

Marjo Saastamoinen is an evolutionary biologist who specialises in the stress biology of wild species.

• Life history ecology & evolution
• Dispersal
• Genotype-phenotype association
• Phenotypic plasticity
• Ecological immunology

Office: 5617 (Biocenter 3)
E-mail: irene.conenna@helsinki.fi

Irene earned a PhD in Wildlife Biology from the University of Helsinki in 2021. In REC, she is in charge of tasks concerning database management, data visualisation, GIS and fieldwork coordination.

Office: 5617 (Biocenter 3)
E-mail: laura.k.kukkonen@helsinki.fi

Laura is in charge of financial and personnel administration, project management and research support.

Office: 5612 (Biocenter 3)
E-mail: anne.duplouy@helsinki.fi

Anne is fascinated by the interactions between eukaryotic hosts and their microbial symbionts, particularly their evolution in changing environments. She completed her PhD at the University of Queensland in Brisbane Australia, and then moved to Helsinki for her first research fellowship, where she worked on population genetics and adaptation in the Glanville fritillary butterfly. After a couple of years at the University of Lund on a Marie Curie Fellowship, she is now back in Helsinki as the leader of the Insect Symbiosis Ecology and Evolution research group. Her research group is affiliated with REC.

Office: 5601 (Biocenter 3)
E-mail: elina.kaarlejarvi@helsinki.fi

Academy Research Fellow Elina Kaarlejärvi is a community ecologist studying how environmental changes and species interactions shape biodiversity and functioning of boreal forest and tundra systems. Her research group is affiliated with REC.

Office: 5204 (Biocenter 3)
E-mail: hanna.susi@helsinki.fi

Hanna works in Finnish Innovation Fund Sitra funded project Biodiversity Solutions for Agriculture. In this project, the aim is to measure biodiversity of multiple taxonomic groups (microbes, invertebrates, birds, plants) in diverse farming systems and landscape configurations. In addition, Hanna investigates ecology and evolution in plant-microbe interactions.

• Host-pathogen interactions
• Plant ecology
• Agroecology
• Microbiome

Office: D318 (Exactum, Kumpula Campus)
E-mail: mikhail.shubin@helsinki.fi

I am a statistician and mathematical modeller working with ecological and epidemiological data. I'm interested in data visualization and philosophy of Statistics.

I'm currently working on marine biodiversity.

I am a statistician and mathematical modeller working with ecological and epidemiological questions and applications. Currently I am especially interested in how to best collect and analyze data from nature to understand its dynamics and mechanisms, for instance how to design meaningful ecological monitoring studies.

PL 27 (Latokartanonkaari 5)
E-mail: helena.wirta@helsinki.fi

I am interested in ecological communities from various perspectives: what taxa they consist of, how are they structured, how they function and how did they form to what they are as well as how they change.

My research currently focuses on pollination communities. My main project examines honeybees and their interactions with microbes and flowers, assessing how these communities and interactions change and how they are formed, using DNA based identification.

Kumpula campus
E-mail: alyssa.cirtwill@helsinki.fi

My main research interests are how we can describe the ways species fit into ecological networks and what the network perspective can add to our understanding of ecology. I am currently investigating how phenological change in plants and insects affects pollination networks, including crops that we humans depend on. I am also interested in how we can draw better conclusions from messy and missing data.

Office: 5413 (Biocenter 3)
E-mail: laura.antao@helsinki.fi

My main research interests are biodiversity, macroecology and global change. I am interested in biodiversity synthesis and biodiversity patterns, and how we can generalize information across taxa and habitats, and furthermore across scales. In my future research, I will examine patterns of biodiversity change using long-term data and large scale environmental drivers, such as climate and land-use.

Laine Lab
Office: 5711 (Biocenter 3)
E-mail: krista.raveala@helsinki.fi

I work in Anna-Liisa Laine’s group with the main focus on the ERC-funded “The Coevolutionary Consequences of Biodiversity Change” project. My variable tasks include organizing field work, managing data and assisting with publications. Occasionally I get to go to the field. Together with our technician Ilona we take care of many kinds of practicalities in the Laine lab.

Laine Lab
Office: 5711 (Biocenter 3)
E-mail: ilona.peltoniemi@helsinki.fi

Laine Lab
Office: 6413 (Biocenter 3)
E-mail: andrea.davrinche@helsinki.fi

Functional and community ecologist with a background in ecophysiology, I am interested in understanding the role of diversity and species interactions in responses of individuals, species and communities to environmental pressures.

I am especially enthusiastic about all things plant, and questions around how variation and plasticity play into diversity-related processes. In REC, my work aims at understanding community dynamics through time and space, as well as investigating the biodiversity-ecosystem functioning relationship in Finnish forests.

• Community ecology
• Functional ecology
• Biodiversity - ecosystem functioning relationship
• Plant ecology

Laine Lab
Office: 6413 (Biocenter 3)
E-mail: paula.thitz@helsinki.fi

Paula is interested in how vegetation diversity affects plant-invertebrate interactions and ecosystem functioning. In her current projects, she studies the effects of vegetation diversity and functional properties on soil fauna and aboveground arthropods in agroecosystems, and how the interactions between the two affect the functioning of these ecosystems. Additionally, she is interested in plant phenolic compounds (especially in boreal trees) and their bioactivity against abiotic and biotic stressors.

Laine Lab
Office: 6413 (Biocenter 3)
E-mail: tuuli.rissanen@helsinki.fi

My research interests focus on understanding how environmental drivers shape patterns in species distributions, community composition and diversity at different scales. Tundra and boreal plants are especially close to my heart but I'm also interested  in combining information across taxa and different ecosystems. 

• Species-environment relationships
• Spatial and temporal patterns
• Biogeography
• Biodiversity

Environmental and Ecological Statistics Group
Office: 5205 (Biocenter 3)
E-mail: emy.guilbault@helsinki.fi

I am a statistical ecologist with a background in Engineering in Agronomy - Ecosystems. My research interests are species distribution modelling, data quality aspects, and improving spatial and temporal predictions. I intend to combine conservation and species/communities aspects into species distribution modelling. On the field, I occasionally participate in bird ringing sessions!

During my postdoc at the REC, I will be analyzing ecological time-series datasets to understand how ecological communities and ecosystem functioning are changing over space and time across different habitats in response to climate change and human use of natural resources.

• Species distribution models
• Data quality
• Spatio-temporal patterns
• Environmental changes
• Biodiversity

Environmental and Ecological Statistics Group
Office: 6715 (Biocenter 3)
E-mail: liam.singer@helsinki.fi

Environmental and Ecological Statistics Group
Office: Kumpula campus, Exactum, A408
E-mail: nourhan.shafik@helsinki.fi

Nourhan is a postdoctoral researcher working on multivariate and time series analysis.

Spatial Food Web Ecology Group
Office: 5611 (Biocenter 3)
E-mail: bess.hardwick@helsinki.fi

Spatial Food Web Ecology Group
Office: 5204 (Biocenter 3)
E-mail: emilie.ellis@helsinki.fi

Emilie is a Postdoctoral researcher working on numerous projects within REC and the Spatial Food Web Ecology Group. She is an applied pollinator ecologist by training, with a special interest in the ecology of non-bee pollinators such as moths. Her current research addresses: 

• The relationship between biodiversity, land-use changes and ecosystem functioning.
• The species- and community- level temperature niche changes in response to climate change.
•  The ecology of pollinators in agricultural and forest systems.

Spatial Food Web Ecology Group
Office: 5205 (Biocenter 3)
E-mail: jussi.makinen@helsinki.fi

Jussi Mäkinen studies changes in species communities and in their functional composition. His project combines long-term monitoring data from Finland with state-of-the-art statistical modeling. Other studies focus on species interactions, especially between butterflies and their host plants, and statistical methodology to estimate the interactions.

• Spatio-temporal statistics
• Population ecology
• Community ecology
• Species distribution models
• Data integration

Life-history Evolution Research Group
Lammi Biological Station
E-mail: suvi.ikonen@helsinki.fi

Life-history Evolution Research Group
Office: 5413 (Biocenter 3)
E-mail: arthur.rodrigues@helsinki.fi

• Community ecology 
• Macroecology and macroevolution 
• Biogeography

Life-history Evolution Research Group
Office: 5413 (Biocenter 3)
E-mail: audrey.bras@helsinki.fi

Postdoctoral project : Spatio-temporal genetic variation of butterflies in relation to land use and recent population trends, parts of a newly established Centre for Ecological Genetics (EcoGenetics)

• Population genetics
• Landscape genomics
• Ecology and Evolution
• Human-driven environmental changes

Life-history Evolution Research Group
Office: 5716 (Biocenter 3)
E-mail: natalie.vandis@helsinki.fi

Natalie is interested in the evolutionary potential of wild populations under global change. She combines long-term ecological data of Lepidoptera populations with genomics approaches to find factors that influence the rate of adaptation.

Project: Assessing the adaptive potential of wild butterfly populations using temporal genomics

• Population genomics
• Eco-evolutionary dynamics
• Glanville fritillary butterfly (Melitaea cinxia)

Laine Lab
Office: 6413 (Biocenter 3)
E-mail: sara.leino@helsinki.fi

Environmental and Ecological Statistics Group
Kumpula campus
E-mail: ilaria.pia@helsinki.fi

Environmental and Ecological Statistics Group
University of Eastern Finland
E-mail: juho.kettunen@uef.fi

PhD project supervised jointly by Lauri Mehtätalo and Eeva-Stiina Tuittila from the University of Eastern Finland.

Environmental and Ecological Statistics Group
Kumpula campus, Exactum, A408
E-mail: karel.kaurila@helsinki.fi

Spatial Food Web Ecology Group
PL 27 (Latokartanonkaari 5)
E-mail: bastien.parisy@helsinki.fi

Spatial Food Web Ecology Group
PL 27 (Latokartanonkaari 5)
E-mail: sonja.saine@helsinki.fi

Life-history Evolution Research Group
Office: 5716 (Biocenter 3)
E-mail: lola.fernandezmultigner@helsinki.fi

PhD project "Genetic diversity in Range-Shifting Butterflies". Funded by the LUOVA doctoral programme (Jan. 2024 - Dec. 2027). Supervised by Marjo Saastamoinen and Audrey Bras.

• Landscape genetics
• Spatial ecology
• Genetic diversity
• Environmental change & conservation

Life-history Evolution Research Group
Office: 5607 (Biocenter 3)
E-mail: nadja.verspagen@helsinki.fi

PhD project “Insect stress tolerance across a latitudinal gradient”. Funded by the LUOVA doctoral programme (to NV, started in February 2020). Supervised by Marjo Saastamoinen and Michelle DiLeo.

• Adaptive potential
• Phenotypic plasticity
• Latitudinal clines
• Environmental stress

Life-history Evolution Research Group / Project SpecIAnt
Office: 5202 (Biocenter 3)
E-mail: patrick.heidbreder@helsinki.fi

PhD project "Survival Under Warming Climate and Adaptive Potential of Hybridization". Funded by the LUOVA doctoral programme (Jan. 2023 - Dec. 2024). Supervised by Jonna Kulmuni and Marjo Saastamoinen.

• Hybridization and speciation
• Evolutionary genomics
• Adaptive potential
• Thermal performance

Life-history Evolution Research Group
Office: 5607 (Biocenter 3)
E-mail: ulla.riihimaki@helsinki.fi

PhD project “Linking population trends to ecological performance in butterflies”. Funded by the Novo Nordisk Foundation as a part of project “The missing link: unraveling the role of genetic variation of beneficial arthropods in agro-ecosystems" (to Marjo Saastamoinen as a co-PI).

• Ecological performance
• Genetic diversity
• Population ecology
• Land use & biodiversity

Northern Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning Research Group
Office: 5205 (Biocenter 3)
E-mail: daniel.fernandezgarcia@helsinki.fi

Life-history Evolution Research Group / PLASTI-CITY: Urban evolution of seasonal plasticity across space and time
Office: 5607 (Biocenter 3)
E-mail: juho.kokko@helsinki.fi