Postdoctoral researcher in psychology

The Department of Biodiversity Sciences at the University of Turku invites applications for a post-doctoral researcher to work in the ERC-funded NATURETIME project. The post-doctoral researcher position is initially offered a 24 months (2 years) full-time contract, potentially renewable for another 33 months. Employment begins in August 2026 at the earliest, and no later than the 1st of October 2026.

The post-doctoral researcher will be working with the Biodiversity and Sustainability Solutions (BISONS) Lab. Our research team aims to contribute toward finding solutions for sustainable futures that can benefit people and nature. We focus on developing new insights on human-nature interactions and using that information to enhance biodiversity conservation and sustainability efforts. We are a growing international and interdisciplinary research group and draw from a range of approaches for our research, with a strong focus on digital data and methods.

The successful candidate is expected to benefit from and collaborate with other team members, including the PI and approximately ten other researchers (MSc and PhD students, post-docs and project researchers), as well as with an extended network of international collaborators.

Job description

The selected post-doctoral researcher will be working under the ERC-funded project entitled "Understanding how nature reshapes human sense of time to foster well-being and sustainable futures" (NATURETIME). The project aims to understand how nature experiences influence human time perception and how time perception influences human behaviours towards nature. For this, the project will use virtual-reality experiments to understand how specific landscape features and nature experiences influence human time perception, and validate experimental results using real-world data obtained with citizen science. The project will also model the effects of nature on time perception at the landscape scale under different scenarios and employ