Gunilla Karlsson Hedestam, PhD

Professor at Karolinska Institutet

Speaker

Gunilla Karlsson Hedestam received a BSc from Uppsala University in 1990 and a PhD in Biochemistry from the University of Oxford in 1993. She was a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School during 1994-1998 where she studied antiviral B cell responses. After a 3-year stint at Pharmexa, a biotech company in Copenhagen, she took up a position at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm in 2001, where was promoted to Associate Professor in 2004 and to full Professor in 2012. Her research focuses on B cell immunology and immunoglobulin genetics. Her group has developed methodology to study allelic and structural diversity in the immunoglobulin loci, as well as methods to trace antibody lineages in next generation sequencing data for an improved understanding of the evolution of antigen-specific B cell responses.