The Faculty of Science at the University of Turku invites applications for a fixed-term postdoctoral researcher position at the Department of Biology. Employment begins in February 2025 at the earliest or upon agreement, and lasts until the end of December 2026.

The position is part of the Human Diversity research consortium, funded by the Profi7 program of the Research Council of Finland. We are now recruiting 3 postdoctoral researchers for Human Diversity and this is one of these advertised positions. The central questions of the consortium are how human contacts, past environments and communication networks influence material and immaterial culture, genes, disease burden, transgenerational effects, evolutionary fitness of people, and languages and their use. Human Diversity brings together research teams across different faculties who study human diversity 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

Human health stems partly from adaptations to diverse ancestral environments and the challenges posed by our rapidly changing modern world. Infectious diseases and food shortages, in particular, have exerted significant selection pressures on human health evolution. Also access to nature and microbes, resources, population structure and social contacts vary through time and place and can fuel adaptations that enhance health in these environments.

We are looking for a postdoctoral researcher to unravel the questions on how human health and closely related life-history traits (survival and reproduction) have been shaped by natural selection during the human evolutionary past. In line with the focus of the Human Diversity Consortium, the research focuses especially on how health has evolved in response to human social and communicative networks in different environments.

Human social networks have radically changed from the traditional multi-generational, kin-centered networks of our evolutionary past to smaller, more dispersed and less kin-directed networks of today, due to the economic and demographic transitions of the 19th and 20th centuries. Social contacts are also affected by large-scale migration patterns, which creates new social environments and disease risks for individuals. Human Diversity Consortium explores how social contacts have shaped risks of dying of specific diseases, reproduction and survival in past and modern environments. The postdoctoral researcher will work under the supervision of Associate Professor Mirkka Lahdenperä, 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. The postdoc's work tasks also include some teaching (at maximum 5% of working time).