I started my studies in Bournemouth University (UK) 1997 and did my Bachelor’s degree in the field of Environmental Protection graduating in 2000. I ended up writing my dissertation on the reporting of cyanobacterial blooms in the Gulf of Finland. When I started my Master’s degree studies in University of Helsinki 2001, I was fascinated by the magical world of phytoplankton so I chose Hydrobiology as my major but also studied Geology, Botany and Environmental Biology. Paleolimnology seemed to bind all these subjects together nicely so I was soon convinced that I wanted to be a paleolimnologist. For my Master’s thesis I studied Lake Saanajärvi’s subfossil diatom community to find out if currently ongoing changes in the community also occurred during an earlier warm period.

I started working on my PhD in 2009 focusing on in the use of chrysophyte cysts in climate change studies. Very little is known about the cyst morphotypes in Finnish lakes so currently I’m going through sediment material from different parts of Finland to find out what kind of fancy cysts are hidden in the mud just waiting to be discovered and used in paleostudies. Hopefully, I end up having a nice training set for chrysophyte cysts that can be used in reconstructing past spring temperatures.

My research interests include subfossil chrysophyte cysts and diatoms, modern and subfossil pollen, phytoplankton and paleolimnology.