The Norwegian node of the Nordic EMBL Partnership, NCMM, is delighted to announce that it has appointed two new group leaders.

Dr. Marieke Kuijjer has been recruited as group leader for Systems Medicine, and Dr. Emma Haapaniemi has been recruited as group leader for Precision Medicine.

Dr. Marieke Kuijjer: Working to solve biological questions via computational and systems biology

Dr. Kuijjer’s research centres on solving fundamental biological questions through the development of new methods in computational and systems biology. Her research also focuses on implementing these techniques to better understand gene regulation in healthy tissues, and also in diseases such as cancer. Kuijjer is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the group of Professor John Quackenbush at the Department of Biostatistics and Computational Biology of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI) and Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health (HSPH). Her research here has focused on developing computational methods for integrative network science, with the aim of better understanding cancer.

Dr Kuijjer comments:

"I am very excited to join NCMM, and am looking forward to starting my own research group in Systems Medicine in Oslo. My research programme will focus on developing computational tools to integrate 'omics data into networks of interacting molecules. I will apply these systems tools to large-scale cancer datasets to pinpoint specific mechanisms that drive the disease."

Dr. Emma Haapaniemi: Developing safe and affordable CRISPR-based tools to help treat monogenic diseases

Dr. Haapaniemi’s research interests include rare disease genetics and high-throughput biology. She recently completed her postdoctoral training in the group of renowned systems biologist, Jussi Taipale, at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden. Haapaniemi's postdoc included work with different high-throughput screening technologies and precision genome-editing, culminating in a landmark paper published in Nature Medicine, which showed that CRISPR-Cas9 can inadvertently disable the cellular DNA damage detection system and, in doing so, turn healthy cells into cancerous cells. The main focus of her research programme will be to develop safe and affordable CRISPR-based tools for the treatment of monogenic diseases.

Dr. Haapaniemi comments:

“I’m very much looking forward to joining NCMM, and to establishing my group in Oslo. The main focus of my research programme will be to develop safe and affordable CRISPR-based tools for the treatment of monogenic diseases."

Learn more about Dr. Kuijjer's appointment

Learn more about Dr. Haapaniemi's appointment

Dr. Kuijjer will officially start at NCMM in October 2018.

Before taking up her group leader role at NCMM, Haapaniemi will spend six months working at Oslo University Hospital from January 2019 in order to pursue her training in paediatrics. She will continue her residency part-time in parallel with setting up a group at NCMM.