After recieving my master's degree in psychology from Åbo Akademi University, I worked for a few years in child and adolescent inpatient and outpatient clinics. While working with the families, I often encountered questions concerning whether a child's challenges were related to neuropsychological functioning or socio-emotional well-being, and became interested in how these aspects of human functioning develop in interaction with each other.

I've had the opportunity to deepen my understanding for these questions, as I in 2016 started my PhD studies within the FinnBrain Birth Cohort Study, a multi-disciplinay study that explores the combined influence of environmental and genetic factors on child development and later health outcomes. I work within the Child Development and Parental Functioning Lab. We are conducting multiple study visits with children and their parents, assessing self-regulation with cognitive test batteries, experimental tasks, eye movement tracking, mother-child free-play situations, and questionnaires. This behavioral data is linked to other FinnBrain data to unravel the biological and neural mechanisms of the development of self-regulation.

Within the framework of child self-regulation development, I'm especially interested in the following topics:

How does maternal executive functioning affect maternal caregiving behaviour?

How does maternal caregiving affect child executive functioning development?

Is maternal caregiving a link between maternal and child executive functioning; does intergenerational transmission of executive functioning take place through maternal caregiving?

Can child development of executive functions be supported through interventions focusing om maternal caregiving behavior?

Together with a collegue I've taught a course on psychological evaluations of children and adolescents for psychology students at Åbo Akademi University during the years 2015-2018.