I am an evolutionary biologist fascinated areal variation that we can see today in populations of humans and other species. What has driven or inhibited populations differentiation or contacts? What does the contemporary variation tell us about the past? In my PhD I studied phylogeoraphy and speciation of ants in the Palearctic region. During my postdoc I have been studying human populations in the Uralic language speaker area. I have been applying population genetic framework to linguistic data, and studied Uralic languages, Finnish dialects, and spoken language in Helsinki. At the moment I am studying two-way division of Finland with genetic, linguistic and cultural data. Our aim is to use data from different field to create a holistic view about the human past in the Uralic speaker area.

Major interests

• Multidisciplinary research
• Change in time and place
• Divergence and convergence

Information about our interdisciplinary team BEDLAN (Biological Evolution and Diversification of LANguages)