Speaker

Sten Linnarsson took his PhD in 2001, studying neurotrophic factors regulating neuronal survival, growth and plasticity. Instead of a postdoc, he founded a company to develop methods for gene expression analysis and single-molecule DNA sequencing. In 2007, he was appointed assistant professor and in 2015 Professor of Molecular Systems Biology at Karolinska Institute. He is currently the dean of the preclinical research departments at Karolinska Institute.

He was awarded the 2015 Erik K. Fernström Prize for his work in single-cell biology. He is a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO), the Organizing Committee of the Human Cell Atlas initiative, the Nobel Assembly and Nobel Committee for Medicine or Physiology at Karolinska Institutet.

Since 2007, Linnarsson has pursued single-cell biology of the adult and developing human nervous system. He has made important contributions to single-cell technology: unique molecular identifiers (UMIs) for accurate quantification; Patch-seq for combined electrophysiology, morphology and transcriptomics; RNA velocity to extract dynamic information from snapshot measurements, and more. In a series of recent papers he has used these methods to explore the mammalian brain, culminating in complete single-cell atlases of the mouse nervous system (2018 and 2021) and the human brain (2023).

Currently, his group focuses on the origin and cellular composition of human brain cancer, and on developing cancer therapy based on programmable DNA nanoparticles.

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