Five new Academy Research Fellows for the Ģֱ

The Academy of Finland has decided to fund five new Academy Research Fellows at the Ģֱ. Laura Karavirta and Elina Sillanpää from the Faculty of Sport Sciences as well as Nerea Abrego, Antti Eloranta and Jussi Lehtonen from the Department of Biological and Environmental Science at the Faculty of Mathematics and Science were each granted a five-year funding.
Published
6.5.2021

Each researcher was granted around 450,000 euros for paying their own salaries.

Academy Research Fellows implement scientifically high-level research plans and have versatile networks. They have an opportunity to qualify for more demanding researcher positions and establish independent researcher positions in the international researcher community. The awarded funding was directed to the Academy of Finland’s research projects in Biosciences, Health and the Environment. Funding was granted to 33 new postdoctoral researchers.

The new Academy Research Fellows:

Laura Karavirta’s research focuses on the physical activity of older adults. Our understanding of older people’s physical activity in relation to recommendations is based on models that do not account for individual abilities. Methods based on the speed or volume of movement may underestimate the actual load experienced by an older person. Karavirta will develop a method for quantifying physical activity in older people that takes into account individual differences in performance and makes it possible to develop personalised physical activity recommendations.

Elina Sillanpää seeks to research causal associations between genetic inheritance, physical activity and CMD by utilising large population based datasets (FinnGen, HUNT), genetically controlled longitudinal follow-up data on twins (Finnish twin cohort), polygenic scores and advance statistical methods. She aims to use DNA methylation data to identify potential mechanisms and pathways that regulate associations between genetic risk and CMD and mortality and validate these findings with gene expression analysis and metabolomics.

The aim of Nerea Abrego’s research project is to understand what determines which fungi plants form partnership with.

Plants and fungi need each other to survive. Plants of the same species can team up with a wide array of fungal species, so that in one location they team up with other fungal species than in another location.

”Is it so that plants selectively team up with those fungi that are most helpful for their survival in the particular location where they grow? If yes, is this because of co-evolution that has taken place between the plants and the fungi; or is it so that plants simply associate with those fungi that are available at the location where they grow?”, Nerea Abrego raises research questions.

The research project will answer these questions using both direct field observations as well as experiments. The results will help to understand how species survive under different environmental conditions, such as the study species Alpin bistort in both mild low-altitude conditions and harsh high-altitude conditions.

In his research project Antti Eloranta explores the large-scale effects of natural and anthropogenic environmental factors on food webs and salmonid populations in more than 100 cold-water lakes. Eloranta’s innovative project will support the sustainable management of cold-water lakes and their vulnerable salmonid stocks.

The factors related to human activity include invasive species, hydropower operations and fishing.

“The resulting empirical and theoretical models will elucidate the underlying factors that determine the biomass and resource use of individuals and populations in ecological networks and thereby the structure, function and resilience of cold-water lake ecosystems”, Eloranta says.

In his project Jussi Lehtonen is studying sexual selection from first principles.

The female and male sexes are biologically defined by their gamete size: the producer of the larger gamete (e.g. egg) is by definition female, and vice versa. One of the oldest and most debated questions in biology concerns the consequences of this definitional gamete size difference. Can sex-specific trait evolution be traced all the way back to such 'first principles'?

Although there are many models of sexual selection and gamete evolution, very few models connect the two showing how gamete size could influence sex-specific evolution of traits such as competition for mates, mate choice, or parental investment.

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