Professor of Social and Public Policy at the Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy of the University of Jyväskylä
In his research, Teppo Kröger analyses care policy from local, comparative and global perspectives. His studies have focused on, for example, social care for older people, integration of formal and informal care, conditions of care work, and reconciliation of caring and paid employment. He has drafted new conceptual perspectives for the research field, including the concepts of welfare municipality, weak universalism, dedomestication, demographic panic, care capital and care poverty. He is a regularly invited speaker in national and international conferences and seminars and an expert consulted frequently by policy-makers and the media.
Teppo Kröger is Co-Chair of the international Transforming Care Network (TCN). He also co-coordinates the 'Unmet Needs, Inequalities and Care Poverty' (UNICAP) research network, which is an Interest Group of the Global Observatory of Long-Term Care.
Kröger and his research team participate in three Nordic research projects:
- Building sustainable care systems for older people in the Nordic-Baltic region
- Early Intervention in long-term care: new model for tailored initial efforts and allocating of services
- NORDCARE3: 20-year follow-up of working conditions in Nordic long-term care
He is also a member of scientific advisory boards of several other international projects:
- Care-led innovation: The case of eldercare in France and in Japan (INNOVCARE, France)
- Collaboratively developing age-friendly communities with municipality eldercare, spatial planning and Senior Citizens’ Councils (CollAge, Sweden)
- Developing a validated scale for Adult Social Care worK-related quality of life (ASCK-WELL, UK)
- KI Transdisciplinary Research Center for Personalized Dementia Prevention & Care (TraCeDem, Sweden)
- Learning from long-Term Care practices for the European Care Strategy (LeTs-Care, Italy/EU)
- New models of replacement care for working carers (Australia)
- Social networks in an ageing population (FinNät, Finland)
- When collaboration falters: Family members’ managerial caregiving (Sweden)
Teppo Kröger supervises master and doctoral theses that analyse social policies of ageing, care, disability and family. At the moment, he is supervising 8 PhD researchers. His students have been awarded for the Best PhD Thesis of the University of Jyväskylä (Helena Hirvonen, 2014) and the Best Master Thesis in Social Policy in Finland (Emilia Leinonen, 2014 and Mikko Myllymäki, 2020). He is also Co-PI of the national Interdisciplinary Doctoral School of Social Services (DocSoc360°, 2025–2027).
Teppo Kröger has evaluated applicants for professorships in Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, the United Kingdom and the United States, and research proposals in Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Iceland, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland and for the European Research Council (ERC Advanced Grants) and the Open Research Area for the Social Sciences (ORA). He has been an external examiner of PhD theses in universities in Finland, Sweden, Norway and New Zealand. He is an editorial board member of the International Journal of Care and Caring, the Nordic Journal of Social Research, Socialvetenskaplig Tidskrift (the Swedish journal of social work research), Janus (the Finnish journal of social policy and social work research) and for book series of De Gruyter and Policy Press. He has been a reviewer for over 35 academic journals as well as for Palgrave Macmillan and Policy Press.
From 2018 to 2025, Teppo Kröger was Director of the Centre of Excellence in Research on Ageing and Care (CoE AgeCare). He is the recipient of the 2024 Nordic Prize in Gerontology (the Sohlberg Prize). As well, he has received the ’UNO of the Year – All-rounder of Science’ (Finnish Union of University Professors, Jyväskylä chapter, 2021) and 'the Science Communication Act of the Year' (University of Jyväskylä, 2019) awards.
