I am Associate Professor at the Department of Biomedicine and Steno Diabetes Center Aarhus, conducting independent research on how cells change in disease. My group works on the blood vessels in type 2 diabetes, on degenerative disease and on tissue repair, using single-cell and spatial technologies that we develop ourselves. My background is in genetics and gene editing, with fifteen years of CRISPR and large-scale sequencing. I founded the Stenomics Core Facility in 2025.
I study how cells change state in disease and ageing, and whether those changes can be reversed. My main focus is the cells lining our blood vessels in type 2 diabetes, which help determine whether damage develops in the eyes, kidneys and heart. I also work on degenerative disease and tissue repair, including ageing muscle, the nervous system and the kidney. Using single-cell and spatial sequencing, I map how cells shift from a healthy to a diseased state, and test what can move them back.
I teach genetics and personalised medicine on the bachelor's degree programmes, and I lead two PhD courses in omics: one covering genomics, transcriptomics and proteomics, and one with hands-on single-cell data analysis. Using a research-based teaching strategy, my goal is to educate researchers who can design, analyse and critically interpret their own experiments. I have also contributed to the development of teaching materials in genome editing and single-cell analysis.
I collaborate with clinical and basic research groups at Aarhus University Hospital and with groups abroad, on diabetes, muscle, kidney and vascular disease. I am part of the management team of CellX, the Danish single-cell infrastructure, and I started the SDCA-Biomed seminar series to connect technology platforms with clinical research groups.
Based on my expertise in omics, I advise research groups and clinical departments at Aarhus University and Aarhus University Hospital on how to design and analyse their studies, from sampling through to data. I am an affiliated researcher at PACE, the Lundbeck Foundation Parkinson's Disease Research Center, and a member of the management team of CellX. I review manuscripts for international journals and serve on PhD assessment committees. I have no commercial advisory roles.
My main responsibility is my own independent research: leading a group that studies how cells change state in disease, ageing and repair, and securing the funding to do it. I supervise PhD students and postdocs, and I teach. I am also responsible for the single-cell, spatial and multi-omics technologies that my group develops and makes available to Steno Diabetes Center Aarhus and the Department of Biomedicine.
