I did my PhD at the University of Turku and the Pertussis reference laboratory, Finnish institute for health and welfare and defended my thesis in 2011. The topic of my research was the evolution and adaptation of Bordetella pertussis, the causative agent of whooping couch, after the initiation of vaccinations.

I did a postdoc (2012-2013) with Prof. Olli Lassila on B cell and plasma cell differentiation after which I changed bact to studying bacteria. I did a postdocs wiht Prof. Julian Parkhill and Prof. Sharon Peacock at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, UK (2014-2016), and Prof. Jukka Corander at the University of Oslo, Norway (2017-2019), using bioinformatic analyses to study whole-genome sequenced bacteria and antibiotic resistance.

A the moment my reseach is still concentrated on WGS analyses and antibiotic resistance as well as microbiome studies.

Main focus of my research is in bacterial genomics, including bioinformatic analyses of population structure, antibiotic resistance and other factors affecting the success of different clones. Recently I have increasingly been involved with several research project investigating the role of the gut microbiome in human diseases e.g. acute appendicitis and prostate cancer.