I am a Finnish research scientist who has been working in France for eleven years. Although I am a meteorologist by formation, I turned to stars very early, and ended up with a Master’s thesis and a Ph.D. thesis (2007) in the University of Helsinki, Finland, focused on modelling the atmosphere and cloud formation on Mars.
I left Finland after my PhD for a post-doctoral fellowship in France, and concentrated on analysing cloud observations from the Mars Express satellite. I was hired as a permanent research scientist of the CNRS in 2009. This has allowed me to broaden my research to the clouds on Venus and deepen our understanding on the formation processes of Martian mesospheric clouds through developing models of cloud microphysics and analysing satellite observations in a large international collaboration network.