There he completed his PhD thesis, which was supervised by Tauno F. Mustanoja and Matti Rissanen, in 1989, later becoming docent in English Philology.
[5] Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Kilpiö, Rissanen, Kahlas-Tarkka, Victor I. Shadrin and Ludmila Chakhoyan led a project to promote collaboration between European and Russian scholars.
The scheme supported the development of corpus linguistics, focusing on English historical linguistics, in St Petersburg, and facilitated the study of medieval and early modern manuscripts and printed books of English provenance held in St Petersburg.
[2] In 2010, he was the recipient of a Festschrift,[16] and the 'Valoisa keskiakia' ('Luminous Middle Ages') prize, awarded by Finland's medieval studies society Glossa.
[17] At the time of his death, Kilpiö was collaborating with Kahlas-Tarkka on an edition of the diaries of Ann Bathurst, a seventeenth-century mystic.