Hello new staff #11

Sophia started out working in diagnostic histopathology in Sundsvall and moved to Stockholm in 2020. In Stockholm, she has been working at Karolinska University Hospital with biobanking, clinical trials and research projects within pathology. She will be working at the Division of Pathology, not with a specific research group, but throughout the division. She will mainly be coordinating the lab as well as working with inventory purchases and act as a safety delegate for the division. 

Wenyang comes from China where he achieved his medical degree from Shanghai Jiaotong University. He had completed master study in the University of Lyon 1 in France, mainly focusing on the impacts of EMT against chemotherapy and target therapy in breast cancer. Currently he works in Jonas Fuxe group, studying how EMT cells interact with the immune system. He will reveal how EMT affects tumor cells dissemination to lymph nodes and reorganizes lymphocytes. He will study the capacity of EMT cells to be recruited to distant inflammatory sites. He will also characterize different EMT markers as diagnostic tools in breast cancer patients. 

Penelope has been conducting research at Tampere University on the comparative sustainability of neutralizing antibodies induced by different HPV vaccines via follow-up of 2 phase III clinical trials, and on the effectiveness of different HPV vaccination strategies and whether HPV-vaccination induces type replacement via follow-up of a large Finnish community randomized vaccination trial.  She will be utilizing the unique infrastructure of linkable population-based registries and biobanks of the Nordic countries to define and determine the HPV vaccine induced protective antibody level against cervical precancer (and factors which may impact this) using a case-cohort study of Finnish women.

Francesca comes from Italy and has a MSc in Biology applied to Biomedical Research. Previously she was Research Assistant at Bambino Gesù paediatric Hospital in Rome studying autophagy-mediated mechanisms of immune resistance in pediatric brain tumours. At Labmed she is a PhD student under the supervision of Anna Pasetto, working on the development of immunotherapy strategies for brain tumours.

After a PhD on the pathophysiology of dengue infection (France), Stéphanie did several postdocs in Germany. She worked on highly pathogenic viruses, in link with innate immunity, in BSL-2, -3 and -4 labs. She was involved in vaccine development, and established a reverse-genetics system for CCHFV. At Labmed she will continue to study the mechanisms involved in virulence/ pathogenicity of viral hemorrhagic fevers. 

Maarten did his Ph. D at the University of Amsterdam, where he worked on delineating the function of the hepatitis B virus accessory protein X. Then he worked for four years on the same topic in the Institute of Virology in Munich. Since October he lives in Upplands Väsby with his girlfriend and his cat James Tiberius Kirk. His work here will focus on HIV latency, and on finding out how the X protein functions.  

Mikaela is a Karolinska Institutet graduate who today is a licensed biomedical laboratory scientist with clinical physiology as the main specialization. She has previously worked at the physiology clinic at Södersjukhuset, Karolinska Hospital and, at the Children's Heart Center at Astrid Lindgren's Children's Hospital. Her research area is lung physiology and she is writing her dissertation at Uppsala University with prof. Magnus Svartengren as main supervisor and prof. Thomas Gustafsson as one of the co-supervisors. For a year now, she has been a project manager for the new master's program in biomedical laboratory science at Karolinska institutet, which is a mission that she will continue to work with this year. Otherwise, she intends to work with education in the form of teaching and administration.