I am a doctoral student at Environmental and Marine Biology at Åbo Akademi University. My PhD thesis is titled “Resilience of Arctic and subarctic to increasing sea surface temperatures”, which I started on in 2024, with Christian Pansch, Giannina Hattich and Conny Sjöqvist as my supervisors.
I’ve always been interested in polar environments and especially found cold-water phytoplankton intriguing. In particular, 
the phytoplankton community residing within sea ice and how these are affected by climate change always piqued my interest. My Master’s project approached these issues by comparing the phytoplankton community during a heatwave winter without sea ice to a winter with normal ice conditions in a bay on the Åland Islands. After having completed both my Bachelor and Master at ÅAU, I worked as a research assistant within the joint plankton group at ÅAU and Turku University.
For my doctoral studies, I have shifted my focus slightly from the Baltic Sea to higher latitudes. Utilising diatom strains collected in the Arctic Baffin Bay region, I am currently investigating interactions between adaptation and dispersal and their role in maintaining diatom diversity in the rapidly warming Arctic. The project aims to reveal the effects of climate change on diatoms in cold-water systems, their adaptation and possible range shifts. Predictions of future phytoplankton dynamics currently rely mainly on models parameterised with thermal optima only. By including the study of genetic dynamics across seasons and space, this will hopefully enable more precise predictions, advancing our understanding of climate change implications on the oceans.