Nominees for the Board of the Nordic Metabolomics Society (2019)


The Society has nine voting members and a non-voting secretary. The board must include at least one member from each of the five Nordic countries, at least one early-career researcher, and a representative of the host institution (handling society registration and accounting). Election of the new board members will be held by online voting, restricted to the Society members (as of October 18, 2019), between October 21 and 28, 2019. The new Board members will serve a 2-year term, and each Board member can serve up to two consecutive 2-year terms.
Here are the nominees.

Nils Joakim Færgeman (University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark)
Tone Frost Bathen (Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway)
Daniel Globisch (Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden)
Kati Hanhineva (University of Eastern Finland, Kuopio, Finland)
Katharina Herzog (Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden). Early-career nominee.
Rikard Landberg (Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden). Host institution nominee.
Anders Nordström (Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden)
Matej Orešič (Örebro University, Örebro, Sweden and University of Turku, Turku, Finland)
Tarja Rajalahti Kvalheim (University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway)
Oscar Daniel Rangel Huerta (Norwegian Veterinary Institute, Oslo, Norway). Early-career nominee.
Óttar Rolfsson (University of Iceland, Reykjavík, Iceland)
Craig Wheelock (Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden)


Board member biographies


Nils J. Færgeman is professor and director of the molecular metabolism and metabolomics unit at The Department of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry at University of Southern Denmark. He obtained his PhD degree in molecular cell biology in 1997 from University of Southern Denmark and after a post-doctoral period at Albany Medical College (Albany, NY, USA), he was recruited back to University of Southern Denmark, where he has been an independent PI since 2003. His research interests revolve around how metazoans sense alterations in the environment and in their genome and how they adapt metabolism to maintain cellular homeostasis, promote survival and achieve balanced growth. His group takes a systems biology-wide approach and combines genomics, proteomics and metabolomics to untangle novel mechanisms regulating metabolism. He has a particular interest in lipid metabolism and made several important contributions to understanding the functional role of lipid binding proteins and fatty acid transporters in fatty acid import, transport, metabolism and signaling.

Tone Frost Bathen is professor in Medicine (MR technology) at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Department of Circulation and Medical Imaging. Since the early 90-ties, Tone Frost Bathen has worked with the implementation of nuclear magnetic resonance techniques in cancer. As head of the MR Cancer group, her main research interests are focused towards personalized medicine and studies of functional and metabolic properties of cancer using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and spectroscopy (MRS). By developing, optimizing and applying advanced MR (in combination with other Omics-levels) to characterize cancer, the goal is to establish better diagnostic tools for stratification of patients to treatment, treatment monitoring and evaluation of prognosis. Current research activities mainly focus on breast and prostate cancer, enabled by a close collaboration with clinicians at the St. Olavs University Hospital in Trondheim. Although clinical research has high priority, a broad spectrum of systems for cancer studies provides translational research, covering ex vivo NMR as well as in vivo MR imaging and spectroscopy of cancer cells and laboratory animals. The MR cancer group maintains several large biobanks of human tissue and biofluid samples, and is internationally recognized for their large scale analyses of intact cancer biopsies. The research group is also involved in biomedical research related to cardiac heart disease, preeclampsia and testing of new contrast agents. Tone F. Bathen is Scientific vice-leader of the MR Core Facility at NTNU, and she is also academic responsible for a PhD course in metabolomics provided biannually at NTNU. Tone F. Bathen is a member of the Scientific Board of the Norwegian Cancer Society, she has a strong funding track record, and a large network of international collaborators.

Daniel Globisch is an Associate Professor in Analytical Pharmaceutical Chemistry and a SciLifeLab Fellow at Uppsala University. He received his PhD degree from the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich in Germany in 2011, where he quantified natural RNA/DNA modifications using mass spectrometric techniques. For his postdoctoral studies, he joined The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, CA (USA) working on bacterial quorum sensing and metabolomics analysis. During his 4,5 year stay Dr. Globisch discovered the urinary biomarker N-acetyltyramine-O-glucuronide (NATOG) using a metabolomics mining approach for the neglected tropical disease onchocerciasis, for which he developed an antibody-based urine dipstick test. He started leading his independent laboratory in September 2015 at Uppsala University after recruitment by the Science For Life Laboratory. Dr. Globisch’s research focus lies on the development of new Chemical Biology tools to enhance the scope of metabolomics research. His interdisciplinary research projects integrate global metabolomics, organic chemistry as well as Chemical Biology and are focused on elucidating the metabolic interaction between microbiota and their human host. He explores the potential of microbiota metabolism as a new strategy for the discovery of unknown biomarkers for pancreatic and colorectal cancer as well as unknown bioactive metabolites produced by the gut microbes.

Kati Hanhineva (current member of the Board, nominee for the second term), PhD, Academy Research Fellow, is group leader at the School of Medicine, Department of Public Health and Clinical Nutrition at the University of Eastern Finland, Kuopio, Finland. She completed her PhD in plant biotechnology at the University of Kuopio 2008, and conducted post-doctoral research at the Department of Public Health and Clinical Nutrition in projects related to the beneficial health effect of whole grain rich diets, before becoming a group leader at the same department. Currently her research group’s main interests are within the phytochemical diversity of plant-rich foods, and the impact of colonic microbiota on those, as well as the metabolic alterations they subsequently evoke once entered mammalian metabolism. Hanhineva is also the founder of a spin-off company providing metabolomics services (Afekta Technologies).

Katharina Herzog (early-career nominee) obtained a PhD in biomedicine as a Marie Curie Early Stage Researcher at the Academic Medical Center (University of Amsterdam). Her long-standing research interests are the increased understanding of human metabolism, with a focus on prevention, diagnosis, and clinical perspectives of human metabolic diseases. Other key interests are the application of metabolomics, bioinformatics tools, and data integration for patient-oriented research. During her PhD, Katharina performed functional lipidomics studies and investigated novel biomarkers in samples from patients with a peroxisomal disorder. As a postdoctoral researcher, Katharina translated her research interests into the field of diabetes. At Lund University, Katharina studied the effect of interventions such as diet and gastric bypass surgery on the plasma metabolome. Since October 2019, Katharina pursues a Novo Nordisk postdoctoral fellowship within the Institute of Environmental Medicine at the Karolinska Institute, studying the prognostic role of environmental, metabolic, and clinical factors in a hybrid form of diabetes. Since 2018, Katharina is a committee member of the early-career member network (EMN) of the Metabolomics Society.

Rikard Landberg (current member of the Board, nominee for the second term) is a professor of food and Health at Chalmers University of Technology where he is heading the Division Food and Nutrition Science at the Department of Biology and Biological Engineering. His group studies the role of diet and dietary components in health and disease using observational and intervention studies as well as in various model systems. Metabolomics (MS- and NMR- techniques) has become a center point of the research for discovery and validation of exposure and prediction biomarkers, and currently, for molecular phenotyping to discover biomarkers to guide (dietary) intervention individualization strategies. The group is engaged in several large national and international cohort studies and infrastructures where they generate metabolomics data from thousands of individuals to address different research questions in nutrition and medicine. RL is also the principle investigator of randomized controlled trials to evaluate health effects of various food components in a precision nutrition approach. RL is affiliated Professor at the Department of Public Health and Clinical Medicine at Umeå University and a visiting scientist at Danish Cancer Society Research Center in Copenhagen and at the Nutritional Epidemiology Unit at the Institute of Environmental Medicine, Karolinska Institutet. RL has authored/co-authored ~95 papers, ~10 book chapters, delivered ~10 invited lectures and is the editor of one book. RL has an H-index of 25 according to Scopus.

Anders Nordström, is a group leader at the department of molecular biology at Umeå University. He obtained his PhD at Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Umeå 2004 and did postdoctoral research at Scripps Center for mass spectrometry in La Jolla after which he became assistant professor at department of oncology-pathology at Karolinska Institutet 2008. Since 2013 is he Associate Professor and co-director of Swedish Metabolomics Centre in Umeå.

Matej Orešič (current member of the Board, nominee for the second term) holds a PhD in biophysics from Cornell University (NY, USA). He is a group leader in systems medicine at the University of Turku, associate professor at the Örebro University, and guest professor in lipids and nutrition at the Oil Crops Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences. As of 2016, Prof. Orešič is a Lifetime Honorary Fellow of the Metabolomics Society. In 2019, he was co-chair of the 1st Gordon Research Conference on 'Metabolomics and Human health'. His main research areas are metabolomics applications in biomedical research and systems medicine. He is particularly interested in the identification of disease vulnerabilities associated with different metabolic phenotypes and the underlying mechanisms linking these vulnerabilities with the development of specific disorders or their co-morbidities, with main focus on type 1 diabetes and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. Prof. Orešič also initiated the MZmine project, leading to a popular open source software for metabolomics data processing.

Tarja Rajalahti Kvalheim is senior advisor (Research and Innovation), and researcher and project manager (Fjordomics) at Førde Health Trust (Norway). She is also associate professor at University of Bergen, Dept. of Chemistry (Norway). She has background in chemical engineering and biotechnology (MSc, Helsinki University of Technology) and holds a PhD from University of Bergen for applying spectral profiling and chemometrics in clinical chemistry. She has 20 years’ experience in data analysis, both in industry and in academia. Her current research is focusing on clinical metabolomics, i.e. metabolic profiling using advanced instrumentation (e.g. NMR) and multivariate data analysis (Fjordomics.com). She is also involved in other healthcare related projects where e.g. registry data and questionnaires are analyzed. She is a chairperson (since 2012) for Norwegian Chemical Society/ Division of Chemometrics, and a member of the Nordic organizing committee for the Scandinavian Symposium on Chemometrics –conferences. The Swedish Chemical Society awarded her Herman Wold Medal in silver 2017 for important contribution in the field of chemometrics.

Oscar Daniel Rangel Huerta is nutritionist and Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from the University of Granada, Spain. Marie Curie Fellow in metabolomics in the Diet and Oxidative Stress Research Group in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Oslo (2016 – 2019). Guest researcher in the University of Copenhagen (Lars Dragsted Research group). Currently a Postdoctoral researcher in the Chemistry and Toxinology Research group at Norwegian Veterinary Institute, Norway (2019). My primary interest is based on the use of LC-MS based metabolomics as a tool to understand the effect of dietary components and bioactive compounds in health and obesity-related pathologies. My expertise is mainly on data analysis, both the pre and post-processing, of metabolomics datasets and its integration with other types of omics data.

Óttar Rolfsson (current member of the Board, nominee for the second term) holds a PhD from the Astbury Center of Structural Molecular Biology at The University of Leeds. He is an Assistant Professor in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology within the Medical Department and within the Center for Systems Biology at the University of Iceland. Óttar teaches human metabolism and systems biology to all students within the Health Sciences Department at UI. Work within the Rolfsson laboratory is focused on understanding how molecular metabolism contributes to health and disease through mass spectrometry metabolomics approaches and cell scale metabolic modelling. The groups main focus at present is elucidating red cell and platelet metabolism in the context of transfusion medicine and investigating metabolic changes associated with disease related cellular developmental events including epithelial to mesenchymal transition, mesenchymal stem cell development and endothelial dysfunction.

Craig Wheelock (current member of the Board, nominee for the second term) leads the Integrative Molecular Phenotyping laboratory at the Karolinska Institute and is a Distinguished Visiting Professor of Metabolomics at the Gunma Institute for Advanced Research (GIAR) at Gunma University, Japan. His research focuses on mass spectrometry-based molecular phenotyping of obstructive lung disease. These efforts are combined with multivariate modelling to perform omics-based data integration to identify sub-phenotypes of disease. A major area of the research in his group centers on investigating the role of lipid mediators in pulmonary inflammation. Recent efforts involve performing exposome-based studies to understand the effect of environmental exposure upon disease etiology and identify sensitive sub-populations of individuals with respiratory disease. The overall aim of the work in his group is to develop personalized molecular profiles that can be associated with an individual’s lifestyle, environmental exposure and susceptibility to disease onset. Dr. Wheelock is a member of the European Respiratory Society (ERS) Scientific Events Working Group, Board Member of the International Metabolomics Society, and consultant at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine on metabolomics and the exposome.