Dr. Erkko Lehtonen obtained his master's and doctoral degrees in mathematics from Tampere University of Technology, Finland, in 1998 and in 2007, respectively; his doctoral dissertation was titled "Operations on finite sets, functional composition, and ordered sets". He got his habilitation in 2018 from the Technische Universität Dresden, Germany, with thesis titled "Reconstruction of functions from minors". Prior to joining Khalifa University in 2022, he has held postdoctoral research and teaching posts at University of Waterloo (2007–2008), University of Luxembourg (2009–2013), University of Lisbon (2014–2015), TU Dresden (2015–2019), and NOVA University Lisbon (2019–2022).
Dr. Lehtonen's research interests lie at the confluence of universal algebra, combinatorics, and discrete mathematics. An active researcher, he is an author of over 50 journal articles and several conference papers, published in distinguished journals, such as Algebra Universalis, Discrete Mathematics, International Journal of Algebra and Computation, Journal of Algebraic Combinatorics, Order, and Semigroup Forum. He serves in the editorial board of Discussiones Mathematicae – General Algebra and Applications.