Biography

Welcome to read the short of biography of me, Heidi Toivonen, a Finnish Doctor of Psychology and Assistant Professor of Psychology at Franklin University Switzerland.

I’m originally from Finland, where I worked as a clinical psychologist at various services from psychiatric hospitals to career counselling. At the side of my day job, I worked towards a PhD degree which I earned in 2020 from the University of Jyväskylä. My PhD papers investigate (non)agency constructions in psychotherapy conversations.

In 2021, I was worked at the amazing NARMESH research project based at Ghent University, Belgium. In this project, I studied how reading or watching stories concerning the perspective of the environment can shift people’s thinking about the nonhuman. In this postdoc project, I was bridging environmental humanities, literary studies, and psychology, in the hopes of understanding how to harness the potential of narrative to help humans make sense of the climate crisis.

From the end of 2021 until 2024, I worked at the University of Twente in the Netherlands as Assistant Professor of Narrative Psychology. My teaching was focused on clinical psychology, self-reflection and autobiography writing, as well as research methods. I fell in love with teaching and won the University of Twente Educational Award, meaning, I was selected as the Teacher of the Year in 2023. At the technologically oriented University of Twente, I became very interested in studying the psychological aspects of technology use and in understanding more about the role of technology in both psychological interventions and everyday life, something that I think will characterize my research well into years to come.

I joined the lovely Franklin University Switzerland community in August 2024, full of enthusiasm for teaching and research in this buzzing Liberal Arts milieu. Since my postdoc research, I have been very interested in the role of storytelling in helping us humans deal with phenomena such as climate change. At Franklin, the Liberal Arts spirit encourages such work at the crossroads of psychology, environmental sciences, and literary studies. At the same time, I continue to study e.g. therapeutic interventions and mobile applications, while keeping the door open for any other research ideas that might find their way to me.

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