Current Chair

Dr. Juho Antti Junno is a Finnish associate professor at the University of Oulu. He divides his time between Archaeology in the Faculty of Humanities and Anatomy in the Faculty of Medicine. His work and research interests span bioarchaeology, anatomy, forensic medicine, and even primatology. His research combines several scientific fields, exploring, for example, how bone health is influenced by evolutionary and historical factors versus modern lifestyle factors.

During his career, Dr. Junno has also been a visiting scholar at the University of Sheffield, UK, and a Fulbright fellow at Johns Hopkins University, USA. In addition, he has conducted fieldwork in remote locations, for example, studying mountain gorillas in the rainforests of Uganda and Rwanda.

Junno lives at his family farm, which he has managed for the past couple of decades. He spends evenings, weekends, and holidays working on the arable farm, producing oats, canola, peas, and grass seeds.

In addition to his academic work and farming, Junno pursues writing as a semi-professional hobby. Due to his farming background and interest in agriculture, he writes for major Finnish agricultural magazine Käytännön Maamies as well as the major sporting magazine Metsästys & Kalastus. The latter magazine aligns with his favorite hobby, hunting. Through hunting, Dr. Junno has become very familiar with terminal ballistics, and this interest has developed into research activities, such as an experimental study on the potential assassination of the Swedish King in 1718.

Like most Finns, Dr. Junno has ties with the Finnish-Canadian community. Some of his relatives moved to Port Arthur and several neighbors to British Columbia in the 20th century. Even the farmhouse where Dr. Junno lives was built in the late 19th century by his neighbor, who had worked in the copper mines of the Great Lakes region and, upon returning home, built this house.

For several years, he has been aware of and interested in the Chair in Finnish Studies position and has decided that the timing was finally right to apply. At Lakehead University, Dr. Junno teaches a course on the population history of Finland. While in Thunder Bay, he is also interested in observing the influence of Finnish immigrants on agriculture and forestry in the region.