Three new Tenure Track Professors to Human Diversity

Human Diversity consortium is happy to announce that we have three new Tenure Track Professors. Dr Elina Salmela represents archaeogenomics and is focused on the genetic population history of Finland and nearby regions. Dr Mirkka Lahdenperä is focused on evolution of life-histories, health and health behavior in historical and modern societies and Dr Outi Vesakoski is focusing on human linguistic past through language change in time and space.

Elina Salmela

Elina is an Associate Professor in Archaeogenomics at the University of Turku, both in the Department of Biology and in the Department of Archaeology. With a background in population genetics, she focuses her research on the genetic population history of Finland and nearby regions, combining insights from DNA sequence data of modern and ancient individuals with knowledge produced by other disciplines, in collaboration for example with experts of archaeology and historical linguistics. This provides a unique view not only on human genetic diversity and major biological events such as migration, population contacts and admixtures, and natural selection, but also to past individuals’ lives and roles as members of their communities.

Mirkka Lahdenperä

Mirkka is an Associate professor in the Department of Biology, UTU. Her research focuses on evolution of life-histories, health and health behavior in historical and modern societies. She investigates how social and physical living environments are associated with survival, reproduction and health of humans and how the past environments have shaped our health in the modern world. Her research utilizes various datasets from historical and modern Finland and is highly multi-disciplinary, enabling to take a long-term view on health and life-history evolution and the underlying environmental, cultural and social factors in humans. She conducts also comparable research on long-lived and highly social Asian elephants, and is particularly interested in how elephant milk is affected by their living environments and health of individuals.

Outi Vesakoski

Outi runs a BEDLAN team studying human linguistic past through language change in time and space. This is done through data infrastructure collected by BEDLAN: “Uralic Trove” (suomeksi UraLaari) includes linguistic variation of Finnish 100 years ago, UraLex (Uralic basic vocabulary cognate corpus), UraTyp (Uralic typological features including also Grambank features for Uralic languages), as well as the cartographical database of Uralic language speaker areas. The linguistic variation can be studied in relation to (a)biotic variation of Finland and the Uralic speaker area, and material and immaterial cultural variation in Finland in 1600-1800’s. The spatial approach on Finnish past can be further achieved through AADA, an archaeological artefact database of Finland, collected through interdisciplinary projects Kipot ja kielet and URKO. The computational framework has turned the high-quality information achieved in historical linguistics, cultural studies and archaeology into easily accessible data bases, that BEDLAN uses to study language evolution with methods derived from population biology, phylogenetics, landscape ecology, geography and computational sciences.