Positions open in Human Diversity consortium

The Centre of Excellence for Human Diversity Through Contacts at the University of Turku is part of UTU profiling area of Human Diversity and part of thematic area Cultural Memory and Societal Change.

The CoE combines world-leading researchers in digital language studies, computational and evolutionary linguistics and Natural Language Processing, as well as ancient and modern human genetic, cultural and contemporary diversity at the University of Turku. The CoE studies human diversity and contacts from prehistory all the way to the contemporary world and digital online communication. How did preindustrial mobility affect us? How were the linguistic, genetic and cultural landscapes formed, both in Finland and in the Uralic speaking area? How do contemporary contacts show up in the digital world and how can we model those using machine learning and NLP technologies? The CoE is divided into four research objectives studied in interaction between the four collaborating research groups: Lummaa lab, TurkuNLP, SUGRIGE, and BEDLAN teams. The objectives include:

1) Environmental and social drivers of encounters: How do sociocultural settings and ecological environments drive and hinder human contacts?

2) Dynamics of contacts in the digital world: What do patterns of multilingual web language use across registers and genres reveal about contemporary contacts and their role in shaping human diversity in the digital world? How can computational methods be developed to both model these patterns and advance linguistic theory?

3) Short-term legacies of contacts: What are the impacts from individual life-history outcomes to population-level alterations?

4) Long-term legacies of contacts: Which genomic, linguistic and cultural traits and values remain and contribute to human diversity over centuries and millennia?

We study these objectives based on our unique datasets and established interdisciplinary approaches. At our disposal, there is unique data on the spatiotemporal changes in archaeological and genomic records in the area of current Finland, as well as data on environmental and travel landscapes and human pedigrees with life histories and diseases. Further, our linguistic and genomic data covers Northern Eurasia, and especially the Uralic language family. Now we also develop multilingual deep learning and LLMs to model contacts and the variation of language use in massive web-scale data.

We are now opening new postdoctoral researcher, research assistant/project researcher and doctoral researchers positions for the multidisciplinary research consortium. The targeted fields are Evolutionary Language Sciences, Evolutionary Demography and Digital Linguistics / Natural Language Processing.

We are looking for 

  • Postdoctoral researcher (2 yrs) and a Doctoral researcher (4 yrs) in Evolutionary Language Sciences in the field of linguistics. Apply for these positions here; deadline 26 February 2026 at 16:00 (Europe/Helsinki).
  • Postdoctoral researcher in Evolutionary Demography (3 yrs) in the field of evolutionary biology. Apply for this position here; deadline 27 February 2026 at 16:00 (Europe/Helsinki).
  • Four Postdoctoral researchers in Natural Language Processing (2 yrs) in the field of language technology. Apply for these positions here; deadline 26 February 2026 at 16:00 (Europe/Helsinki).
  • Project researcher or Research assistant (6 mths) in the field of data engineering. Apply for this positions here; deadline 23 February 2026 at 16:00 (Europe/Helsinki).
  • Project researcher or Research assistant (1 yr) in the field of evolutionary biology (In Finnish). Apply for this position here; deadline 26 February 2026 at 16:00 (Europe/Helsinki).