Center leader Kristian Hveem, MD, professor in clinical epidemiology and medicine at the Dept. of Public Health and Nursing. Hveem's recent research involvement includes discoveries on MI, T2D, lipids, BMI, blood pressure, and various cancers. He led the establishment of the state-of-the-art HUNT biobank facility in 2006 where he has been the leader for more than a decade. He has also been instrumental in the design and establishment of the Danish National Biobank at SSI, Copenhagen. Hveem brings scientific expertise in cohorts, registries, biobanks, genotyping, data handling and analysis of new genetic variation.

Bjørn Olav Åsvold, MD, internist and endocrinologist, associate professor in epidemiology at the Dept. of Public Health and Nursing, is together with Sætrom one of few young researchers at NTNU selected for the Outstanding Academic Fellows Programme. Åsvold brings expertise in epidemiological methodology, in particular the identification of modifiable causes of disease in population and Mendelian randomization approaches.

Pål Sætrom, professor in bioinformatics at the Dept. of Computer and Information Science and Dept. of Cancer Research and Molecular Medicine, is leader of NTNU’s bioinformatics core facility (BioCore) and an NTNU Outstanding Academic Fellow. Sætrom works towards an improved understanding of gene regulation in human disease, bringing extensive experience in both managing and analyzing high dimensional data and in developing tools for integrating these different data types to discover functional genetic variants, relevant for the bioinformatic prioritization.

Eivind Almaas, professor in systems biology at Dept. of Biotechnology. Almaas works towards an improved understanding of systems-level interplay and design principles of metabolic, gene-regulatory, and protein-interaction networks in cells, bringing extensive experience in both complex network analysis and high performance computing.

We have appointed an external advisory panel with four leading experts in the conduct of high-profile, high-quality studies. This panel provides strategic advice to the management team to ensure the maximum scientific benefit, help resolve any scientific disagreements (in the unlikely event that these occur), and plan for the long term sustainability of the center. The panel meets yearly.

Members

Eleftheria Zeggini, Ph.D., is the Director of the Institute of Translational Genomics in Helmholtz Zentrum München in Neuherberg, Germany. Previously Zeggini served as a research group leader at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, and an Honorary Professor in the Department of Health Sciences at the University of Leicester in the UK.

Mark Daly, Ph.D., is the Director of the Institute of Molecular Medicine Finland FIMM. Daly was recruited from Harvard Medical School - where he was the founding chief of the Analytic and Translational Unit at the Massachusetts General Hospital - and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

Björn Pasternak, MD, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor (docent) at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm. Pasternak is an internationally leading pharmaco-epidemiologist utilizing register based sources for phenotypic curation.

Sekar Kathiresan, MD, is co-founder and chief executive officer of Verve Therapeutics. He is a preventive cardiologist who has made groundbreaking discoveries of cardioprotective genetic mutations, which confer resistance to cardiovascular disease. Prior to joining Verve, he served as director of the Massachusetts General Hospital Center for Genomic Medicine and was the Ofer and Shelly Nemirovsky MGH Research Scholar. He also served as director of the Cardiovascular Disease Initiative at the Broad Institute and was professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.