ERC Advanced Grant to Professor Virpi Lummaa
Evolutionary biology Professor Virpi Lummaa from University of Turku has received major funding from the European Research Council ERC. Lummaa received funding for research which focuses on how major societal changes in the past 300 years have influenced human kinsip networks and through those to their fitness in 18th to 20th century Finland. Lummaa investigates the same questions also in Asian elephants which have suffered from declines in population sizes during the past 50 years due to human influence.
European Research Council has granted Advanced Grant funding to Virpi Lummaa worth of nearly 2,5 million euros. This is a five-year personal research grant for those research leaders who are established and have acquired considerable achievements on their career. This is Lummaa’s third ERC-grant as she has already held European Research Councils Starting Grant and Consolidator Grant.
– This ERC grant helps to understand how societal changes in relatives and social networks in humans as in other long-lived species living naturally in family communities, are connected to lifelong measures of health, wellbeing, and reproduction. This theme is topical, and we are investigating it with interdisciplinary means, says Lummaa.
– ERC Advanced Grant is on of Europe’s most competed fundings where the research idea must be internationally top-ranking. Research Funding Support offers wide support actions for ERC-calls so that our researchers could be successful in obtaining these grants, says research funding specialist Kirsi Kanerva from Turun Yliopisto.
Lummaa obtained the grant for research using pedigrees across generations collected from church records as well as digitized information on Karjaa evacuees later life events and social connections at municipalities they settled. Lummaas research groups long-term dataset on Myanmar Asian elephants allows to investigate how a broken friendship bond effects to various health and welfare measures.
– These datasets are rather unique as war evacuations and transfers of work elepahnst from group to another provide researcehrs an exceptionally good opportunity to resolve how changes in social networks impact individuals later life. Having recorded long-term data before and after the breakage of social connections is rare, Lummaa continues.
Lummaa is the head of Human Diversity -research consortium which focuses on interdisciplinary research on effects of human contacts to culture, language and genetics. Finnish Academy has granted funding for the research in the 2023-2028 call to support strengthening the research profiles of universities. Cultural memory and societal change is one the six strategic profiles which represent the strengths in research and education at the University of Turku.
originally published at https://www.utu.fi/fi/ajankohtaista/mediatiedote/professori-virpi-lummaalle-lahes-25-miljoonan-euron-eu-rahoitus on 18.9.202