Team

University of Turku is in a unique position to reach the international forefront in the field by hosting multiple world-leading research teams studying human diversity from complementary perspectives, constructing diverse digital datasets, and developing technologies for their analysis.

PIs

Virpi Lummaa Human Diversity Director+358 50 438 2044

Virpi holds a professorship at the University of Turku to study natural selection in contemporary human populations. She is keen to investigate how the modern environment itself fuels human evolution and how demographic shifts to low birth and death rates affect the opportunity for selection or specific trait selection. Her group uses longitudinal demographic data from Finland spanning 350 years and 15 generations to look at how the strength and direction of selection on key fitness traits may have changed with the modernisation of societies.

Päivi Onkamo Human Diversity Vice Director+358 50 464 3379

Päivi is Professor of Evolutionary Genomics in the Department of Biology, UTU. Her areas of expertize are population genomics, human archeogenetics, as well as computational genetics, focusing on gene mapping. Her main project is the Ancient genes in North-Eastern Europe (SUGRIGE), where population genetics of ancient people in Uralic speaking areas are being studied. She has ample previous experience on leading multidisciplinary projects integrating genetics and archeology. She has also been active in leading digitalization of archeological datasets (see e.g. URHIA).  Päivi is specifically interested in questions of the natural selection in the past and present in N-E Europe; both the effects of northern environment and diet, as well as the pathogens and epidemics encountered.

Outi Vesakoski Human Diversity Vice Director+358 40 719 7042

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.

TurkuNLP Group

Veronika Laippala Professor+358 50 328 9739
Filip Ginter Professor
Tapio Salakoski Professor+358 40 032 6978

TurkuNLP (Natural Language Processing) is a multidisciplinary research group combining NLP and digital linguistics. We develop machine learning methods and tools to automatically process and understand text data and apply these to explore human interaction and communication in very large digital text datasets such as those automatically crawled from the internet and historical text collections.

AI and computational modelling

Ion Petre Professor

Complex networks and artificial intelligence (AI) play a crucial role in understanding human diversity by providing a framework for analyzing and modeling the interactions and relationships between different individuals, groups, and communities. These methods can reveal relationships and connections between different groups of people, helping to identify patterns of genetic evolution, but also of inequality, and marginalization. Additionally, AI can also help identify and predict potential biases in the data, furthering the understanding of how human diversity is affected by societal and cultural influences. This provides powerful tools for exploring and understanding the rich and complex diversity of human populations.

Archaeology

Georg Haggren Professor+358 50 322 7136

Historical archaeology with a focus in medieval and early modern Northern Europe.

Postdocs

Data management

Trainees and junior staff

Siiri Aalto
Elisabeth Mikkonen
Joonatan Laato
Lyydia Arminen

Coordinators

Mia Lempiäinen-Avci Project Coordinator
PhD
+358 29 450 3949
Jonna Paavilainen
Jonna Paavilainen Research coordinator +358 50 528 6008

I am a research administration professional with background in political science, psychology and communication studies. In Human Diversity, I am taking care of administrative matters.