PEOPLE

TINE JESS, MD, DMSC

Professor & Director of Center for Molecular Prediction of 
Inflammatory Bowel Disease – PREDICT

Dept of Clinical Medicine, Aalborg University Copenhagen

E-mail: jess@dcm.aau.dk

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Professor Tine Jess is an international expert in the field of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). At age 33, she defended her doctoral thesis on prognosis of IBD from Denmark and the Mayo Clinic, US. Alongside, she was co-responsible for creation of a Department of Epidemiology at Novo Nordisk A/S. At age 35, she received a Female Research Leader Grant from the Danish Council of Independent Research and ran a large and successful research group in Copenhagen during 2010-2016, with numerous important contributions to the field published in Gastroenterology, Gut, BMJ, JAMA and New England Journal of Medicine. At age 39, she became professor of Gastroenterology and Epidemiology, and in later years, she has headed Center for Clinical Research and Prevention in the Capital Region of Denmark and Department of Epidemiology Research at Statens Serum Institut in Copenhagen.

Tine Jess is Fellow of the Royal Danish Academy of Science and Letters, has received the UNESCO For Women in Science Award, the UEGW Rising Star Award, a Danish Medal of Honor, she has served as Vice Chair of the Young Academy of the Royal Danish Society of Science and Letters, Head of the Epidemiological Committee of the European Crohn Colitis Organization, member of the ministerial Task Force working to increase the number of women in science, InnoWoman for Innovation Fund Denmark, and Board Member in 'Selskab for Teroterisk og Anvendt Terapi af 1923'. 

KRISTINE HØJGAARD ALLIN, MD, PHD

Associate Professor & Partner in Center for Molecular Prediction of 
Inflammatory Bowel Disease – PREDICT

Dept of Clinical Medicine, Aalborg University Copenhagen

E-mail: allin@dcm.aau.dk

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Kristine Allin combines clinical epidemiology and molecular epidemiology to unravel the etiology, pathogenesis, and prognosis of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) with a specific focus on the role of the gut microbiome. She has a PhD in clinical and genetic epidemiology and a post.doc. in the role of the gut microbiome in cardiometabolic diseases. Before joining PREDICT as partner, she was head of Clinical Epidemiology at the Center for Clinical Research and Prevention in the Capital Region of Denmark.

Kristine Allin’s research aims to elucidate whether the gut microbiome represents a causal factor driving IBD development and progression. To address this overall aim, she investigates the impact of microbiome-related environmental exposures on IBD. She studies the co-occurrence of IBD and cardiometabolic diseases and investigates common microbiome-related risk factors, including mutual effects of the medical and surgical management of the two diseases.

Kristine Allin’s research activities have been acknowledged by several research awards including a Sapere Aude Talent grant from The Danish Council for Independent Research and The Danish Diabetes Association’s award.

In PREDICT, Kristine Allin will contribute to the establishment of datasets covering nationwide register data, environmental data, clinical data, and microbiome data prior to and after a diagnosis of IBD. Based on this data resource, she will examine causal risk factors driving IBD development and progression with a specific focus on microbiome-related factors.

Martin Bøgsted, MSc, phd

Professor in Bioinformatics and Statistics

& Partner in Center for Molecular Prediction of Inflammatory Bowel Disease - PREDICT

E-mail: martin.boegsted@rn.dk

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Martin Bøgsted earned an MSc in theoretical statistics from Aarhus University and a PhD in biostatistics from the Royal Veterinary and Agricultural University, Copenhagen. Martin has since been Assistant and Associate Professor at Aalborg University, Technical Project Manager at Telenor A/S, and Senior Biostatistician at Department of Haematology, Aalborg University Hospital. In 2016 he became Professor in Bioinformatics and Statistics at Department of Clinical Medicine, Aalborg University. He has a long track record in project management of complex statistical projects within a wide range of application areas covering the whole statistical value chain from teaching and methodological developments in engineering, epidemiology, clinical trials designs (phase 0, I, II, and III), protocols, power calculations, data management, computational statistics, and statistical analysis. In the later years, his focus has been on translating high throughput biological and big clinical data findings to clinical practice.

In PREDICT, Martin Bøgsted expects to establish a cutting-edge data lake that aims to facilitate the access, analysis, and presentation of integrated clinical and omics data, thereby facilitating implementation of data driven personalized medicine for inflammatory bowels disease. The expectation is also to establish new stable and identifiable unsupervised clustering algorithms for the stratification of IBD patients in a new unbiased disease taxonomy based on genomic, para-clinical, and clinical data, originating from longitudinally disease trajectories. Further, it is expected that new approaches to continuously predict patient’s risk by machine learning techniques will be developed.

david hougaard, MD, DMSc

Head of Danish Center for Neonatal Screening & Director of Dept for Congenital Disorders, Statens Serum Institut

& Partner in Center for Molecular Prediction of Inflammatory Bowel Disease – PREDICT

Email: dh@ssi.dk

LinkedIn

At age 25 David Hougaard became MD and was subsequently Medical Officer in the Danish Army for one year. From age 26-29 he was MD at medical, surgical and psychiatric departments in Denmark. From age 30-35 David was Postdoc at Dept. of Histochemistry, Institute of Pathological Anatomy, University of Copenhagen, Rigshospitalet. After that he became Laboratory leader at the scientific department Molecular Cell Biology, Statens Serum Institut (SSI). At the age of 40 he defended his doctoral thesis. At age 46 he became leader of the Danish Neonatal Screening Laboratory and the Danish Neonatal Screening Biobank at SSI, and at age 62 he became Director Department for Congenital Disorders at SSI.

David Hougaard has scientifically collaborated with several institutions in the US and Europe with a focus on neonatal screening and cell biology as well as genetic, epigenetic and biomarker connections to metabolic, endocrine, psychiatric and cancer disorders. He is author of more than 400 peer reviewed scientific publications including several publications in Science, Nature, Nature Genetic, Cell, JAMA. ORCID number: 0000-0001-5928-3517.

The contribution to PREDICT from the Danish National Biobank and Department for Congenital Disorders will be delivery of IBD and control samples from the biobank as well as DNA sequencing, genotyping of common variants, epigenetic analysis, inflammatory marker analysis and metabolomic analysis of these samples.

Karsten kristiansen, MSc

Professor of Molecular Biology, Laboratory of Genomics and Molecular Biomedicine,
Department of Biology, University of Copenhagen

& Partner in Center for Molecular Prediction of Inflammatory Bowel Disease – PREDICT

E-mail: kk@bio.ku.dk

Linkedin

Karsten Kristiansen is Professor of Molecular Biology and heads the Laboratory of Genomics and Molecular Biomedicine at the Department of Biology, University of Copenhagen. He is also Professor and Director at BGI-Shenzhen and the Institute of Metagenomics, Qingdao-Europe Institute for Advanced Life Sciences, Qingdao, China.

After graduation from the University of Copenhagen, he held research positions at the Max-Planck-Institut für Molekulare Genetik in Berlin and at the Institut de Biologie Physico-Chimique, Fondation Edmond de Rothschild, in Paris. He was full professor and Head of Department of Molecular Biology, later Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, University of Southern Denmark, 1992-2008, before he was recruited as professor and Head of the Department of Biology, University of Copenhagen in 2008. He stepped down from being Head of Department in 2015 in order to spend more time with BGI-Shenzhen.

Central themes of the research of Professor Kristiansen concern the interaction between the host genome, the host immune system and the gut microbiota in regulating gut health and energy metabolism, and how interaction between different nutrients modulates energy homeostasis. In addition, his research groups now explore the interaction between the brain and the gut microbiota. For these projects, his research groups use a combination of molecular biology approaches, animal studies, metagenomics and genomics. He has published more than 400 articles in refereed journals, many of which in high ranking journals such as Science, Nature, and Cell, and he is a WoS Clarivate highly cited researcher.

In PREDICT, Karsten Kristiansen will provide in depth analysis of the composition and functional potential of the gut microbiota and detail how interaction between the gut microbiota, host genome and host immune system will affect/modulate development and progression of IBD. For this, Karsten Kristiansen will use state-of-the-art metagenomics and bioinformatics tools including machine learning and AI.

Lone Larsen, MD, phd

Associate Professor & Gastroenterologist, Aalborg University Hospital

& Partner in Center for Molecular Prediction of Inflammatory Bowel Disease – PREDICT

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Lone Larsen is a Medical Doctor, PhD, Gastroenterologist and Hepatologist, and Associate Professor. She works as Chief Physician at Aalborg University Hospital and leads the North Denmark IBD registry, GASTROBIO. She is Chairman of the National Quality Registry, DANIBD and a member of the national IBD interest group under the Danish Society of Gastroenterology and Hepatology.

In PREDICT, Lone expects to provide data on a complete regional cohort of IBD patients from 1978 until today. The cohort contains 8,000 patients with IBD in the North Denmark Region (~600,000 inhabitants) and there is data on date of diagnoses, age at diagnosis, disease extent at diagnosis, changes in disease extent over time, smoking habits, weight, height, family IBD, medications, effects and side effects, patient reported outcomes, lab results, pregnancies, surgery, etc. This cohort will enable unique studies on phenotypes of IBD.

In addition, Lone and her team will collect blood and stool samples when possible from all of these patients and at all exacerbations of the disease for newly diagnosed patients for at two-year period.

As a physician, Lone Larsen is part of a team of physicians giving care to approximately 2,500 IBD patients. As partner in PREDICT, she manages the clinical data of the North Denmark Cohort.

thomas werge, MSc, phd

Clinical Professor, & Director, Institute of Biological Psychiatry (IBP), Mental Health Services Sct. Hans, Mental Health Services in the Capital Region of Denmark

& Partner in Center for Molecular Prediction of Inflammatory Bowel Disease – PREDICT

E-mail: thomas.werge@regionh.dk

LinkedIn

Thomas Werge is the Director of Institute of Biological Psychiatry and principal investigator of the Lundbeck Foundation iPSYCH Initiative at the Copenhagen University Hospital. He is professor of psychiatry and genetics, and the co-director of the Lundbeck Foundation of GeoGenetic at the University of Copenhagen. 

His major contributions include the identification and clinical characterization of rare, high-risk CNVs in mental disorders at the level of an entire nation, estimating their unbiased risk of disease and degree of pleiotropy at the population-level; thus, merging the otherwise distinct disciplines of genomic discovery and population-bases epidemiology. He has worked for a decade in PPP to general genomic animal models of human risk variants to gain insight into genomic pathobiology and to enable etiology-driven drug discovery

In addition, he has been a founder and leader of numerous genomics consortia, and directing the identification of common genomic, risk-variants (SNPs) in and across the mental disorders, the development of aggregated measures of genetic load applied to inform on clinical heterogeneity. In the past, I made significant contributions to the understanding of population sub-structure among European Caucasians and the development of algorithms for genetic stratification

Building on the insight gained in disease genomics discovery, he has recently initiated the study of the evolution of the genomic causes of complex brain disorders across the past 10,000 years of modern humans.

In PREDICT, Thomas Werge will lead the consortia’s work in disease genomics identifying common and rare risk variants shared between or specific for each of the two IBD disorders being investigated. Using the unique population-based PREDICT sample, Werge will explore heritability of the two IBD disorders and their genetic correlation with other disorders. Family-based risk prediction will be combined with molecular genomics to develop risk predictors for each IBP disorder and to discriminate between them. Furthermore, Werge will map life-course disease-trajectories for IBD patients to examine their genomic basis to inform healthcare provision and planning. 

Manasi Agrawal, Research Associate,
Assistant Professor of
Medicine, Icahn School of Medicine at
Mount Sinai, New York
E-mail: manasi.agrawal@mountsinai.org

Tania H. Bisgaard, PhD student
Dept of Clinical Medicine, Faculty of
Medicine, AalborgUniversity Copenhagen
E-mail: taniahb@dcm.aau.dk

Linea Bonfils, PhD student
Dept of Clinical Medicine, Faculty of
Medicine, Aalborg University Copenhagen
E-mail: lineab@dcm.aau.dk

Maiara Brusco De Freitas, Postdoc
Dept of Clinical Medicine, Faculty of
Medicine, Aalborg University Copenhagen
E-mail: mbrusdefrei@dcm.aau.dk

Rasmus F. Brøndum, Associate Professor
Dept of Clinical Medicine, Faculty of
Medicine, Aalborg University
E-mail: rfb@rn.dk

Heidi Søgaard Christensen, Postdoc
Dept of Clinical Medicine, Faculty of
Medicine, Aalborg University
E-mail: h.soegaard@rn.dk

Anthony Ebert, Postdoc
Dept of Clinical Medicine, Faculty of
Medicine, Aalborg University Copenhagen
E-mail: anthonyce@dcm.aau.dk

Rahma Elmahdi, Postdoc
Dept of Clinical Medicine, Faculty of
Medicine, Aalborg University Copenhagen
E-mail: rahmae@dcm.aau.dk

Carsten Eriksen, Postdoc
DTU Bioengineering, Technical Universty
of Denmark (DTU)
E-mail: carer@bio.dtu.dk

Madeleine Ernst, Head of Metabolomics
Group, Section for Clinical Mass Spectrometry
Danish Center for Neonatal Screening,
Department for Congenital Disorders,
Statens Serum Institut
E-mail: maet@ssi.dk

Lotte Julin Hansen, Project Nurse,
NorDIBD Cohort, Aalborg University
Hospital
E-mail: lkjh@rn.dk

Anne Vinkel Hansen, Statistician
Dept of Clinical Medicine, Faculty of
Medicine, Aalborg University Copenhagen
E.mail: anviha@dcm.aau.dk

Henrik Albæk Jacobsen, PhD student
Aalborg University Hospital
Email: henrik.jacobsen@rn.dk

Jane Due Jensen, Office Clerk
Dept of Clinical Medicine, Faculty of
Medicne, Aalborg University Copenhagen
E-mail: janedj@dcm.aau.dk


Adam Koziol, Postdoc
Dept of Clinical Medicine, Faculty of
Medicine, Aalborg University Copenhagen
E-mail: adamlk@dcm.aau.dk

Annemette Bønneland Kristensen,
PA & Center Administrator
Dept of Clinical Medicine, Facultyof
Medicine, Aalborg University Copenhagen
E-mail: annemettebk@dcm.aau.dk

Camilla E. Lemser, PhD student
Dept of Clinical Medicine, Faculty of
Medicine, Aalborg University Copenhagen
E-mail: celem@dcm.aau.dk

Jesus T. Lominchar, Statistician
Dept of Clinical Medicine, Faculty of
Medicine, Aalborg University Copenhagen
E-mail: jesusvtl@dcm.aau.dk

Nis Borby-Lorenzen, Research scientist
Section for Biomarkers, Immunology
and Antibodies, Danish Center for
Neonatal Screening, Statens Serum
Institut
E-mail: nbop@ssi.dk


Susanne Brix Pedersen, Professor
Dept of Biotechnology and Biomedicine,
Technical University of Denmark (DTU)
E-mail: ​sbp@bio.dtu.dk

Gry J. Poulsen, Statistician
Dept of Clinical Medicine, Faculty of
Medicine, Aalborg University Copenhagen
E-mail: gryjp@dcm.aau.dk

Nathalie Fogh Rasmussen
PhD student, Institute of Regional Health
Research, University of Southern
Denmark, Research Unit of Hospital
Pharmacy, University Hospital of Southern
Jutland, Aabenraa
E-mail: nathalie.fogh.rasmussen@rsyd.dk

Nadja Riis, Data Manager
Dept of Clinical Medicine,Faculty of
Medicine, Aalborg University Copenhagen
E-mail: nadjar@dcm.aau.dk
​

Jonas Rudbæk, PhD student
Statens Serum Institut/Dept of Clinical
Medicine, Aalborg University Copenhagen
E-mail: jojr@ssi.dk/jonasjr@dcm.aau.dk

Anastasia K. Sandri, Statistician
Dept of Clinical Medicine, Faculty of
Medicine, Aalborg University Copenhagen
E-mail: anastasiaks@dcm.asu.dk

Kristin Skogstrand, Head of Section
for Biomarkers, Immunology and 
Antibodies, Danish Center for Neonatal
Screening, Statens Serum Institut
E-mail: ​ksk@ssi.dk

Cæsar Szwebs, Project Officer
Aalborg University Copenhagen
E-mail: csz@adm.aau.dk


Charles Vesteghem, Program Manager,
Digital health solutions
Aalborg University hospital
E-mail: charles.vesteghem@rn.dk

Marie V. Vestergaard, PhD student
Dept of Clinical Medicine, Faculty of
Medicine, Aalborg University Copenhagen
E-mail: marievv@dcm.aau.dk

Marie Villumsen, Postdoc
Center for Clinical Research and 
Prevention, Frederiksberg Hospital
E-mail: marie.villumsen@regionh.dk