The University of Lapland has received €2.5 million in funding from the Research Council of Finland to recruit a high-level international researcher. With this funding, Dr Sean Field will join the University of Lapland’s Faculty of Law as Associate Professor of Energy Transitions Governance.

The Research Council of Finland (RFC) grants competitive funding to Finnish universities to support them in strengthening their research profiles. In the latest funding round (Profi9), funding has been allocated to strengthen universities’ ability to recruit high-level international researchers from abroad.

The researchers and their teams will work in the universities’ profiling areas, which have been previously developed with funding granted by the RCF. This year, a total of €50 million in funding was allocated for eleven universities for the recruitment of 20 researchers. Each position comes with a maximum of €2.5 million in funding from the RCF for a five-year period.

The University of Lapland received in June the RCF funding to recruit one researcher for its ATLAS (Transformative Law for Sustainability Transitions in the Arctic) profile area. With this funding, the University of Lapland’s Faculty of Law will hire Dr Sean Field as an Associate Professor of Energy Transitions Governance, as of 1 August 2026. The appointment is initially a five-year tenure-track position.

In this role, Sean Field will strategically contribute to the university’s research on energy transitions, with a particular focus on energy security governance in the Arctic. He will build a world-leading research programme examining how technological, economic, and legal frameworks shape extraction activities and energy security governance in the region.

“I am honoured to be named the Profi9 Associate Professor of Energy Transitions Governance in the Faculty of Law at the University of Lapland. With this generous funding and support, I will kick-off a series of new cross-cutting collaborations at the University and launch the Arctic Transitions (AT) project later this year,” Sean Field says.

“Arctic Transitions will examine how climate change, energy transitions, and demand for critical minerals have come together to make the Arctic a focal point of new extractive possibilities and new geopolitical governance arrangements. AT will be home to a team of researchers, bring international scholars to the University, and strengthen the University’s ATLAS profiling area. It will also advance the research excellence aims of the University’s Law, Technology and Sustainability Transitions group.”

Dr Sean Field is joining the University of Lapland from the University of St Andrews in Scotland, where he currently serves as Director of Policy at the Center for Energy Ethics and as Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Social Anthropology. Dr Field, originally from Canada, has a multidisciplinary background, including Economic Geography and Applied Economics.

Dr Sean Field also brings to the University of Lapland his practical experience in policy formulation and analysis. Between 2024 and 2026, he was seconded to the UK’s Department for Energy Security and Net Zero as a Lead Analyst where he led, and co-led, several high-profile policy initiatives, including the UK’s recently published Local Power Plan.

Strong indication of successful strategic choices

Sari Lindblom, University of Lapland’s Vice Rector for research, notes that the funding awarded by the Research Council of Finland supports the University of Lapland’s long-term goal of being a leading player in Arctic and Northern research.

“The funding decision of RCF is a strong indication of the high quality of our research and the success of our strategic choices. With this funding, we will strengthen our cutting-edge research, recruit new international high-level researchers, and increase the impact of our research both nationally and internationally,” says Lindblom.

The Profi9 funding strengthens the University of Lapland’s ATLAS profile area (Transformative Law for Sustainability Transitions in the Arctic), which the Research Council of Finland has supported with university profiling funding for the years 2023–2028. ATLAS focuses on sustainability transitions: the profound transitions aimed at addressing climate change, planetary extinction, and other persistent and interconnected crises confronting contemporary societies. The profiling area examines complex legal systems and their role in sustainability transitions in the Arctic and beyond, advancing research-based legal innovation that enables the desired goals related to the sustainability transition.

The new recruitment will support and strengthen legal research by introducing interdisciplinary approaches, recognizing that complex transitions benefit from perspectives that extend beyond legal research alone. Sean Field’s work contributes also to the research undertaken at the Law, Technology and Sustainability Transitions research group within the Faculty of Law.

Further information:

Sari Lindblom, Vice Rector for research, University of Lapland
Tel. +358 40 527 8746
Email: firstname.lastname@ulapland.fi