Description of research and teaching

I study the impacts of ruminant nutrition on animal physiology and production, and the environmental load of livestock production – nitrogen, phosphorus and greenhouse gas emissions. With my research I aim to find solutions for sustainable livestock production, that puts lower load on environment, enhances food security and produces healthy foods with high quality. I’m especially interested in using legumes in animal nutrition and other novel feed resources such as algae, the production of which might be more sustainable than the production of some conventional feeds.

I work as interaction coordinator and postdoctoral researcher in Leg4Life project, which aims to promote the health and welfare of environment and humanity by increasing the production and feed and food use of home-grown legumes (pea, faba bean, lupines, clovers). Leg4Life project is active on 2019-2025 and it is funded by Strategic Research Council at the Academy of Finland. Nitrogen-fixing legumes are great all-round players in many environmental and societal challenges and in Leg4Life we aim to make a major push towards healthier food system and climate-neutral food production and consumption by promoting the production and use of legumes as food and feed.

I defended my doctoral thesis entitled ”Potential of microalgae to replace conventional protein feeds for sustainable dairy cow nutrition” in Faculty of Agriculture and Forestry at University of Helsinki in spring 2019. I worked as postdoctoral researcher at Aarhus University, Denmark (Department of Animal Science) for nearly a year during 2019.