Virpi was given the inaugural Phoenix Award from the Turku Finnish University Society on Friday in recognition of and encouragement for her consistently creative and internationally high-quality research. 

The Phoenix Award was distributed for the first time and the ceremony was held at the centenary celebration of the Turku Finnish University Society at the Old Academy Building on Friday, 3 October 2017. The award was handed by the vice chair of the board and the chair of the science award committee Pekka Vallittu. The justifications for the award state that Lummaa has successfully internationalised and strengthened high-quality scientific research in Turku.

Lummaa's research at the University of Turku started with her doctoral dissertation in 1999 and continued with great success in esteemed European universities. Virpi Lummaa was appointed as the Professor of Evolutionary Biology at the University of Turku in 2017 and as Academy Professor for the period of 2016-2020.

For more information, please visit The Turku Finnish University Society and University of Turku
 

Other News

We are delighted to once again host PhD candidate Silke van Daalen, who will stay with us for most of September.

Laisk T, Tšuiko O, Jatsenko T, Hõrak P, Otala M, Lahdenperä M, Lummaa V, Tuuri T, Salumets A, Tapanainen JS:

Simon's latest work on the demography of grandmothers is now out in PLoS ONE. 

We were delighted to host Professors Martin Daly and Gretchen Perry for a day of excellent talks, with a particular focus on grandmothering and alloparental behaviour.

Robert Lynch is at the Human Behavior and Evolution Society (HBES) conference 2018 in Amsterdam

The manuscript "The transition to modernity and chronic disease: mismatch and natural selection" by Stephen Corbett, Alexandre Courtiol, Virpi Lummaa, Jacob Moorad and Stephen Stea

Two papers out now from Simon's PhD project!

1) Changes in the Length of Grandparenthood in Finland 1790-1959, published in the Finnish Yearbook of Population Reasarch. In this paper, the team investigated how the shared time between grandparents and grandchildren changed across the demographic transition and with industrialisation. This shared time was low and stable before these major events, and began to increase rapidly after they began.

2) Limited support for the X-linked grandmother hypothesis in pre-industrial Finland, published in Biology Letters. Here, we tested whether slight differences in relatedness via the X-chromosome might lead to differences the survival of male and female grandchildren with maternal or paternal grandmothers. Though two of three predictions were supported, we concluded that the X-linked grandmother hypothesis cannot account for lineage differences by itself. 

Our latest paper shows that early-life environment is associated with sex differences in adult mortality and expected lifespan. Out now in Ecology Letters:
http://doi.wiley.com/10.1111/ele.12888

Figure 3a+b, from Griffin et al. 2017

Our review of the contribution of human studies to evolutionary biology is out now in Proceedings of the Royal Society B:
http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/284/1866/20171164