Hello new staff #12

Theresia's last employment was in an organization working with environmental certification of buildings (Sweden Green Building Council). She took care of the financials, the office, purchases, administration at the education department, and a lot more. At BCM she is the division coordinator, meaning she will take care of all HR and financial tasks within her division and also help them with all sorts of administration, like booking travel, dissertations and a lot more.

Yawen graduated and got a PhD degree from Peking Union Medical College in China, majoring in Stem Cells and Regenerative Medicine. She did her PhD project at Loma Linda University in California as a visiting student, which is mainly about iPSC CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing. At BCM, she is a postdoc under the supervision of Joel Nordin. They will develop a novel cell therapy for local delivery of macromolecules, in which the cells will react to specific antigens and after activation start to secrete engineered EVs in the local environment.

Jia is originated from China and studied (clinical) veterinary medicine with bachelor and master education. From KI she received her PhD degree within chronic kidney disease research. She has worked with ultrasound-guided in utero injection to manipulate gene expression during embryo development at Infinigene core facility, KI Solna. She will work at the Portal South core facility, to establish and implement rodent IVF and embryo/sperm cryopreservation, and to develop new genetic engineering techniques for animal research. She will also be involved in Preclinical Imaging Facility (PIF), to provide practical support in multimodal small animal imaging experiments, as well as post imaging data analysis.

Laia comes from Barcelona, Spain where she did her bachelor´s degree in Biology. Since 2015, her research has been focused on the interactions between fibroblasts and T cells, first in lung cancer as a master student at the University of Tromso, Norway, and then in pancreatic cancer as a PhD student, at KI in Helen Kaipe group. During her PhD she focused on the immunoregulatory role of fibroblasts and the expression of co-inhibitory and chemokine receptors on T cells. As a postdoc, she will focus on the relation between different fibroblasts subsets and the infiltration of tumor reactive T cells in pancreatic cancer.

Radosław comes from Poland and has a MSc in Biotechnology. His previous research focused on IPS cells for studying Duchenne muscular dystrophy, cardiomyocyte 3D cultures and on microscopic DNA damage quantification. As a research assistant at Joel Nordin group, Radosław studies CD63 protein to unravel new targeting possibilities for extracellular vesicles which he also investigates for new disease markers.

Debra comes from Indonesia. She obtained her PhD degree from Ewha Womans University, Seoul, South Korea. During her PhD, she studied the role of Src family kinases in mediating the progression of diabetic kidney disease and kidney fibrosis. Currently, she is working on the identification of the novel pathways linked to the atheroprotective effects of high-density lipoproteins, and the validation of their clinical values.

Katie received a BSc in Physiology from University College Cork and an MSc in Regenerative Medicine from NUI Galway, both located in her home country of Ireland. She recently completed her PhD at DentMed under the supervision of Prof. Margaret Sällberg Chen where she studied mucosal-associated invariant T (MAIT) cells in the context of HIV and Hepatitis B virus. Katie will join the VIVAC research group at LabMed and has received an International Postdoc grant from Vetenskapsrådet to conduct part of her work at the Lynch Lab at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston. Her research will focus on harnessing MAIT cells in anti-tumour immunity.

Ramona comes from Italy and is 25 years old. She graduated in Biomedical Science from the University of Perugia in November 2021. From January 2022 to May 2022 she did an Erasmus traineeship in Karolinska with Volkan Özenci's research group. During her traineeship period, she had many tasks such as performing new methods and preparing practical study protocols, she also collected and analyzed important data for different projects. Now she works as a research assistant in Volkan Özenci's research group and will be in charge of the experimental, administrative and communicative parts of the job. 

Sayaka obtained her Ph.D. at the University of Tsukuba in Japan focusing on analyzing publicly available data of pancreatic cancer patients to investigate the prognostic ligand-receptor pairs and correlated cell type pairs using both RNA-seq data and scRNA-seq data. She will continue her research in Sarhan lab to pursue the sex differences in cancer development by integrating dry and wet experiment approaches.

Sadia joined Jonas Fuxe group as a post-doctoral researcher at the Department of Laboratory Medicine/Division of Pathology at KI. The aim of her research project is to explore cell plasticity as a novel target for breast cancer.

Before that she obtained her PhD from Okayama university, Japan in March 2022.  During her PhD she worked with cancer stem cell models derived from iPS cells, focusing on metastasis and drug resistance. She has a bachelor’s degree in Genetic Engineering and biotechnology from University of Rajshahi, Bangladesh and a master’s degree in Molecular Biotechnology from University of Skövde, Sweden.

Hussein is an engaging educator, and highly motivated scientist with a solid understanding and knowledge of pharmacology. He has spent two decades in pharmacy, pharmaceutical, pharmacology, medical science, Ph.D., MPharmSc, and industry experience. He has a wide-range of teaching experiences (three certificates in teaching in higher education). At KI, he will be teaching pharmacology and dose calculation. He is also interested in research in drug discovery.