Postdoctoral Fellowship (08) at University of Helsinki, Finland

Ruralia Institute at the University of Helsinki invites applications for a postdoctoral researcher position for a contract starting at the earliest October 2026 and ending in December 2029. The appointed person will be joining the Sustainability and Community Enterprises group led by Academy Research Fellow Taneli Vaskelainen.

The successful candidate will work in the SUSTRACOOP project (Understanding the role of cooperatives in sustainability transitions), funded by the Research Council of Finland. Cooperatives are a key part of global economy employing some 10% of the world´s working population and they have been identified as focal vehicles of sustainability transitions by researchers and societal stakeholders alike. However, we have limited understanding of cooperative sustainability impact because transition studies have focused on small organizations on emerging sectors and management studies have all but neglected the organizational form. SUSTRACOOP conceptualizes the role of cooperatives in promoting or inhibiting sustainability transitions. The project focuses on large co-operatives in food, forestry, and retail sectors.

Healthcare systems collect vast amounts of heterogeneous data routinely through interactions with individuals. Our mission is to use machine learning and data science to find better ways to utilize this data in healthcare planning, personalized medicine and targeted recall-studies. In this position, you will be a part of an expanding team working on difficult and meaningful challenges together with clinicians. You get to work with multimodal nationwide Finnish health data from 7 million individuals including for example medication purchases, laboratory measurements, clinical notes and imaging. Your main project will involve building and studying multimodal health trajectories on a nationwide scale to catch increasing disease risk as early as possible.

In addition, this data, and similar datasets from our collaborators across the Nordics, Baltics and Europe present a fantastic opportunity to pursue your own ambitious research goals. Our other research directions of interest include privacy of AI models trained on health data as well as training AI models on health data across national borders.

The post-doctoral researcher/university researcher will be working on the EU’s Destination Earth Climate Change Adaptation Digital Twin Project, Phase 3 (https://destine.ecmwf.int/), where INAR is a contributing member. The Climate DT project is setting up an operational simulation framework that enables to produce bespoke climate and impact-sector information, combining global kilometer-scale climate models (IFS-NEMO, IFS-FESOM, and ICON) in a unified operational workflow producing both multi-decadal climate projections and storyline simulations.  

Within Climate DT, the present research task focuses on evaluation of Climate DT simulation quality via direct use of raw Earth observations. The UH team has developed an approach, where simulation data is projected into observation-space quantities while the workflow is active, enabling both run-time reality check and rigorous posterior evaluation of the operational simulations. This novelty is implemented into the integrated workflow and the UH team has therefore access to evaluation material that is very informative about the fine-scale details of modelled versus observed km-scale processes.  

The post-doctoral researcher will explore into this virgin evaluation material with hands-on and contribute to creating new insights into the systematic errors of the Climate DT models and how they affect the adaptation information, developing new methods to utilize the unique material, and also maintain and further develop the observation projection workflow system within Climate DT. Tasks may also include integration of new observation types into the system, in addition to the present synoptic surface observations, radiosoundings, and AMSU-A space-based radiance data.  

Up to three post-doctoral positions are available at the University of Helsinki, Finland working in the research groups of Prof. Craig Primmer and Dr. Tutku Aykanat (http://www.helsinki.fi/evolution-conservation-and-genomics ) as a part of several related research consortia funded by the Research Council of Finland, the Kone Foundation and the ERC, with a focus on using the well studied Teno Atlantic salmon system as a model for adaptive management to assess biological and societal effects of recent anthropogenic changes on the Atlantic salmon metapopulation, alongside a detailed genetic and ecological evaluation of Pink salmon invasion in the river basin and the greater region.

Successful applicants will likely have a strong background in research related to at least one of the themes listed below, but the specific combination of expertise is flexible, with the overall composition of the team being most important.

Effects of management and ecosystem-related changes on salmon life-history phenotype and genotypes
Evolutionary genomic approaches for assessing the effects of recent fishing management changes and invasive Pink salmon abundance on life-history phenotypes and genotypes.
Relevant consortium publications: Erkinaro et al. 2019; Czorlich et al. 2018, 2022

Assessing sex-specific natural selection effects at key life-history loci due to anthropogenic and environmental factors
Use of long- term data on Teno salmon reproductive fitness to assess potential sex-specific effects of recent fishing management changes and invasive Pink salmon abundance selection on Atlantic salmon life-history traits
Relevant consortium publications: Czorlich et al. 2018; Mobley et al. 2019, 2020, 2024

Pink salmon genetics: determining the genetic basis of successful invasion
Use of long-term scale material to identify genomic regions and structural variation potentially associated with higher invasion success.
Relevant consortium publications: Erkinaro et al. 2026

We are looking for a highly motivated and ambitious scientist to join our collaborative, multidisciplinary research team focused on developing new treatment strategies for lung cancer patients.

HaikaLab Immuno-oncology Research Group (www.haikalab.com) at the Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland (FIMM), University of Helsinki, is seeking a curiosity-driven computational immunologist, computational biologist, or cancer immunologist with strong data analytical skills to study tumor-immune interactions and therapy resistance mechanisms in lung cancer.

Our research focuses on understanding how the tumor microenvironment shapes immunotherapy responses using state-of-the-art technologies, including single-cell sequencing, spatial profiling, and advanced patient-derived ex vivo models. We are particularly interested in identifying novel therapeutic vulnerabilities and predictive biomarkers for immunotherapy responses in lung cancer.

The appointment is initially for two years, with possibility of extension, with the starting date as soon as possible after the recruitment decision is made. Please note that the work cannot start remotely. The position is filled with a 6-month probationary period.

The appointment is in the upstarting research group on zoonotic viruses led by professor Johanna Lindahl, which means that the position will include work both at the Faculty of Medicine and the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine (in Helsinki, Finland). The postdoctoral researcher will also visit international projects, mainly at the Taita Research Station in Kenya. The research group works on zoonotic viruses, including those transmitted by mosquitoes, ticks, rodents and birds.

The appointee will perform research in the project. The appointee may also supervise students and participate in other discipline-specific teaching. Teaching tasks can account for 10- 20 % of the annual working time depending on interests and expertise.

We seek an ambitious researcher with expertise in artificial intelligence, machine learning, or computational statistics, and a demonstrated interest in applications to human genetics and/or population health. We primarily seek to appoint at the Research Fellow level, requiring postdoctoral experience and emerging record of independent research, but will also consider candidates to be appointed as Postdoctoral Researchers.

The research action Sustainable Wellbeing Across Lifespan (SWAN) (https://www.swan-helsinkiuni.net/) conducts cutting-edge research to promote health span by identifying individual risks and susceptibilities, aiming to clarify mechanisms of degeneration across the lifespan and exploring new approaches to detecting, monitoring and treating remodeled metabolism associated with ageing. 

The successful candidate is expected to develop an independent research programme within this broad scope, focusing on methodological innovation and the application of modern AI approaches to large-scale biomedical data. Research topics may include foundation models for longitudinal electronic health records and genomics, multimodal learning integrating health records with molecular data, causal representation learning, in-context learning and amortized inference for healthcare decision-making, and AI-assisted scientific discovery workflows.