Henna is a master’s student in the Ecology and Evolutionary biology program at the University of Helsinki. She has always had quite varied interests among the field of biology, which have recently narrowed down to animal behaviour and social evolution. She did her bachelor’s degree at the University of Oulu and did her thesis on microbiome’s effects on vertebrate behaviour. For her master’s thesis she will join the banded mongoose project, where she will be looking into the mongoose personality (boldness) and how it varies between different individuals. She will also see, if there are any possible effects on fitness of the individual depending on its personality. She will be digging through the 20 years of data on the mongoose population and use the weigh data to observe, how willing the individual has been to participate during the weighing events, in addition to any other data relevant to the study.
Email: henna.paakko@helsinki.fi