Profile

My backgroud is very multidisciplinary, I currently work as a postdoctoral researcher in Development studies at the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Helsinki. I am also a visiting researcher at the Digital Geography Lab, Department of Geosciences and Geography, University of Helsinki. I defended my doctoral dissertation at the Department of Biosciences in spring 2016, looking at setting priorities for conservation through an inspection of protected area effectiveness, management and quality of governance. I have been involved in many multidisciplinary research projects, and can work with a variety of methods, ranging from working with local communties to developing and testing novel approaches for analysing satellite based land-use data.

Research

I am broadly interested in questions related to evaluating the effectiveness of conservation actions and the factors affecting this, especially governance and funding. For the moment I work on projects attempting to disentangle the many links between funding, governance and ecological outcomes of protected areas. I am also interested in developing new tools and methods for the evaluation of protected area effectiveness.

Teaching

I have a keen interest in teaching and developing my own teaching skills. I am lecturing at introductory courses in ecology, and I have also been involved in the development and implementation of master level courses in conservation biology at the Department of Biosciences. In addition to this, I have given guest lectures of my field and topic for other departments and institutions.