Espen Bækkevold (Researcher)

Espen is molecular cell biologist and has a PhD in immunology from the University of Oslo. Following a postdoc at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital and a researcher appointment at the Norwegian School of Veterinary Science, he joined the lab in 2007. He is also a Professor at the Faculty of Dentistry, University of Oslo.
Espen has a “wet lab” background, and is interested in applying single-cell technologies to understand the composition and development of immune cell networks in human mucosal tissues.

Diana Domanska (Researcher)

Diana is a bioinformatician and matematician. She received her PhD in computer science from University of Silesia in Katowice (Poland) in 2014. After PhD, she did her postdoc at the University in Oslo in Biomedical Informatics. She worked on statistical analysis of genomics data, interactive visualizations and method development for genome-wide studies. She joined the lab in 2019, where she started working with single cell data and spatial transcriptomics. Current interests are in methods development for genomic data and their analysis.

Kjersti Thorvaldsen Hagen (Laboratory Scientist)

Kjersti is a biomedical laboratory scientist from Oslo Metropolitan University, and Kjersti joined the lab in 2008. Her main expertise is immunohistochemistry- and immunofluorescence methods. She also has genuine interests in molecular biology, especially in the working methods in single cell technologies.

Håvard Takle Lindholm (Researcher)

Håvard is a bioinformatician with a background in molecular biology. He received his PhD in Molecular Medicine in 2021 from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim under the supervision of Menno Oudhoff. In his PhD he studied the interaction between immune cells and epithelial cells in the gut using both wet lab and dry lab techniques. After the PhD, he joined the lab of Daniel De Carvalho at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre in Toronto, Canada as a bioinformatician. In Toronto he is studying mechanisms regulating the presence of immunogenic endogenous retroelements and how these can be targeted to treat cancer. Håvard is part time employed in the Jahnsen lab where he is using his experience with analysis of sequencing and imaging data to study diseases of the gut. 

Karoline Rapp Vander-Elst (PhD student)

Karoline has a Master of Science in chemistry and biotechnology from NMBU. She joined the lab in August 2022 as a PhD student and has a special interest in single cell analysis and spatial transcriptomics. In her PhD project she will work on constructing a whole-transcriptome map of inflamed gut at a single cell resolution, with the aim of identifying biomarkers for personalized treatment for patients with IBD.

Marianne Skeie (Laboratory Scientist)

Marianne joined the group in 2018, after working in another research group at the Dept. of Pathology since 2001. She has a MSc (Cand. scient.) in Biochemistry from the University of Oslo and has broad wet lab experience in molecular and cellular biology.

Linda Solfjell (Laboratory Scientist)

Linda is a Biomedical Laboratory Scientist and has been working at the Dept of Pathology since 1999. She is specialized in molecular biology, with main focus on cloning, RNA/DNA techniques, and PCR. She also helps out with some administrative work.

Sinan Umu (Researcher)

Sinan is a physicist and computational biologist. He has an MS degree in bioinformatics and received his PhD in bioinformatics from the University of Canterbury, New Zealand in 2016. He worked in cancer research and early prediction of cancer using cell-free RNA molecules. He joined the lab in 2022. His current interests are spatial transcriptomics, scRNA sequencing, and RNA biology.