The Faculty of Science at the University of Turku invites applications for contract-based, fixed term postdoctoral researcher position at the Department of Biology from 1.3.2026 to 31.12.2028. Employment starts on 1.3.2026 or as agreed.

The position is part of the Human Diversity Centre of Excellence research consortium, funded by the Research Council of Finland. We combine world-leading research in Evolutionary Language Sciences, Archaeogenomics, Evolutionary Demography and Digital Linguistics / Natural Language Processing to reveal how contacts have shaped human diversity, and how they will continue to shape future generations. The central questions of the consortium include how human contacts, past environments and communication networks influence material and immaterial culture, genes, disease burden, evolutionary fitness of people, and languages and their use. Human Diversity brings together research teams across different faculties who study these themes from complementary perspectives, construct diverse digital datasets and develop technologies for documenting and analyzing such data. Such unique collaboration and data infrastructure enable a holistic understanding of how past human and cultural diversity have evolved, transformed, and created the diversity we see now, and how ongoing migrations and communication networks are likely to affect them both in the physical and digital world.

Job description

We are looking for a postdoctoral researcher to unravel how ecological and social factors have impacted past human contacts such as migration rates between local communities, and how they in turn influence the spread of infectious diseases. For these questions, we use unique national-level digitalized data on all Finnish migrations and death causes during the 19th century, as well as a custom travel effort model across historic Finnish landscape. The postdoc will use the migration data to reveal source and sink areas and time trends in movements - where do people come from and where do they prefer to go? The postdoc will then link the movements to travel effort models, to test if people move as predicted. Finally, the postdoc will quantify the dynamics between migration trends and spread of infectious diseases such as smallpox and measles across the country.

The postdoctoral researcher will work under the supervision of Professor Virpi Lummaa within LummaaLab, but is also expected to closely collaborate with other research groups in Human Diversity and conduct multidisciplinary research. The postdoc will use and combine the diverse datasets collected by the Human Diversity teams and oversee the production and curation of new datasets.

Who we are looking for

The candidate should hold a doctoral degree in evolutionary biology/ecology, demography or similar/other relevant field (completed before the application period ends) and have expertise combining these fields. The candidate should have a scientific and professional background that aligns with the following specific qualifications:

• Strong skills in data management and quantitative methods (for example statistical software R or Python and spatial software ARCGIS/QGIS), and experience in using large and complex datasets, and combining data sources;
• Experience in publishing research articles in international peer-reviewed scientific journals;
• Fluent oral and written communication skills in English.

We seek a highly motivated, enthusiastic and hard-working candidate. The applicant must show good interpersonal skills and be willing to work in close collaboration with the project PI and other members of the international Human Diversity team, as well as have the ability to work independently.

We value collegiality and promote equality, diversity, and inclusivity. We encourage all qualified applicants with different backgrounds to apply for our open positions.