I completed my doctoral thesis on the communicative language competence of monolingual Swedish speakers in Finnish, which was examined at Åbo Akademi University in 2008. In August 2024, I was granted the title of docent (associate professor) at the University of Turku in the research field of Finnish and Swedish language acquisition. My research has focused on four key areas: language assessment, pragmatic language skills, meta-language, and the writing process. In recent years, I have also developed an interest in Nordic minority languages (Meänkieli and Finnish in Sweden), particularly their revitalization and learning.

I am a qualified teacher of both Finnish and Swedish as second language (L2) and in mothertpngue (L1) Finnish and literature. Over the years, I have worked as a teacher in basic education, general upper secondary education, and at five universities. This includes several years as a lecturer in L1 Swedish for teacher education at Luleå University of Technology in Sweden. Furthermore, I have twice been responsible for implementing the national assessment of learning outcomes in Finnish as a second national language (Toropainen, 2001, 2010). Over the years, I have supervised several BA and MA theses in Finland and Sweden, and I have also been involved in supervising some PhD theses, either as a primary or assistant supervisor.