New Senior Research Fellow for Human Diversity: Tarmo Ketola!

Tarmo Ketola is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Turku, Department of Biology. Working within the Lummaa Lab and as part of the Human Diversity consortium, he investigates the severity and spread of epidemics in pre‑healthcare Finland. His research currently focuses on how travel networks and human movement patterns shaped historical pertussis, measles, and smallpox epidemics. He primarily utilizes the extensive HISKI dataset, which contains millions of death records from hundreds of parishes. This rich historical material provides rare insights into sparsely populated metapopulations, in contrast to most contemporary epidemic datasets that focus on large, densely populated urban areas.