Marko Peltonen

Dr. Marko Risto Peltonen (b. 29 July 1961, Kirkkonummi, Finland) is a Uralican scholar. He is also a staunch Uralicist, but unlike many such people, he has never run for office in the Uralican Tribal Council, instead focussing on his teaching and research.

Biography
Born in southern Finland to a criminal psychologist father and a school teacher of a mother, Marko had a fairly nondescript childhood save for his precocity with regards to schoolwork. He was considered a child prodigy, and as such his teachers made sure he was kept at an appropriate level of education - by the age most kids were starting upper high school, he was finishing it with no mark falling below 9½ on the Finnish grading scale.

In spite of superior intellect, though, he remained surprisingly grounded, realising that he too had things he struggled with, which were primarily social in nature. Still, he was well-spoken, and made surprisingly good friendships with those who were older than himself.

He was accepted to the University of Helsinki almost immediately after graduation, and he joyfully flung himself at everything that piqued his interest in high school - although he eventually did an Honours BSc in Psychology, he also loved linguistics, sociology, and religious studies. He would go to school year-round just so he could have his fill of all these fascinations of his, and as such, he again graduated early. He had a Bachelor's Degree before his 19th birthday.

So impressed was the academic community by this prodigy that schools were tripping over themselves to get him into their psychology or cognitive sciences programs. He actually did two Master's Degrees in the end - one at the University of Edinburgh (MSc in Psychology) and one at Oxford University (MPhil in Linguistics with a heavy slant towards Phonetics and Phonology). By 1985, he had no need of work as he had acquired so many grants that he could pay for schooling for another decade.

Returning home to Finland, he taught both psychology and linguistics at the undergraduate level as if he had attained a full PhD, at the University of Helsinki, and his teaching won him accolades from both Finland and European organisations. His quirky sense of humour and striking looks also made him a favourite amongst the school's female population - he recalled in one interview how over the course of one particular semester (the spring session of 1987), he was actually asked out by eight different women. While some young men were jealous of the female attention, they liked his teaching style too much to hold it against him.

One of those eight women turned out to be his future wife, Kaari Valkki. She was a senior-level linguistics student by the time this semester rolled around, and she had a phonology class with him. What made her different from the rest for him was her higher enthusiasm for the subject matter - according to him, the other seven women were also physically attractive "in their way," did at least decently in class, and were more or less around his age.

So they got to talking. He brought psychology into the conversation, and she was legitimately fascinated by it. They were officially an item by the end of the summer of 1987, and they would marry in early 1988, just as he decided to accept an offer from MIT to do a PhD in Psychology there. The extra grant money would come in very handy, as their first child, Sami, was born in Boston in November 1988.

They remained in the United States until 1991, the year Marko finished his PhD in Psychology at the top of his class, and just shy of 30 years of age. Kaari, in the meantime, did an MA in Linguistics there as well, graduating at the same convocation.