Biography

I grew up on a small farm in northern Finland, just south of the Arctic Circle. Although I’ve become more of a lab biologist, my interest in the living world was kindled while roaming the taiga as a child with my parents and siblings.

I studied biology at the University of Oulu, Finland, but it was during my exchange year in Manchester, England, that I became interested in neurosciences. That led me to do my master’s thesis on the eyes of a tiny moth Ectoedemia argyropeza in Oulu under the remote supervision of Benno Meyer-Rochow in Bremen. After finishing MSc I joined Matti Weckström’s lab in the department of physics for my PhD studies. There I was introduced to the visual system of the cockroach Periplaneta americana, which I was told was a complete mess. I stirred the mess a bit further in a virtual reality setting with behavioural experiments and intracellular recordings from the retina. In December 2014 I finally defended my dissertation on the dim-light vision of the cockroach.

Current project

I joined the Lund Vision Group in February 2015 to work with Stanley Heinze and Eric Warrant. My postdoc project is about characterisation of compass neurones and distance encoding neurones in the central complex of two species of bees, the nocturnal Megalopta genalis and the diurnal Bombus terrestris. I will also try to look into how the path integrator works in bee brains.