Jens Nielsen
BioInnovation Institute
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Primary Section: 31, Engineering Sciences Secondary Section: 29, Biophysics and Computational Biology Membership Type:
International Member
(elected 2019)
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Biosketch
MSc in Chemical Engineering and PhD (1989) in Biochemical Engineering from the Danish Technical University (DTU). Professor at DTU in 1998. Fulbright visiting professor at MIT in 1995-1996. In 2008 he was recruited as Professor to Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden. In 2015 he was founding Head of the Department of Biology and Biological Engineering, which now encompass more than 200 people. Jens Nielsen is also a co-founder of the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Biosustainability that now have more than 300 people affiliated, for which he served as CSO 2013-2018. From 2019 CEO of the BioInnovation Institute in Denmark, which is a new institute that will foster translational research and support new spin-out companies in life sciences. More than 280 alumni from his research group. Published >850 publications that have been cited more than 78,000 times (current H-factor 129). Highly cited researcher in 2015-2020. Inventor of >50 patents and founder of seven biotech companies. ENI Award, the Eric and Sheila Samson Prime Minister Prize, the Novozymes Prize, and the Gold Medal from the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences. Member of 11 academies, including NAS, NAE, Chinese Academy of Engineering, and Royal Swedish Academy of Science.
Research Interests
Jens Nielsen is studying and engineering metabolism and its regulations using a combination of mathematical models and advanced experimental methods. By using yeast as the main model system, his laboratory has discovered fundamental principles how metabolism is regulated in response to environmental or genetic perturbations and how metabolism is able to support different cellular functions. This has enabled metabolic engineering of cells to produce various fuels, chemicals or natural products, creating the concept of cell factories. By studying bacterial metabolism, the Nielsen lab provided insight into how different bacteria in communities interact and form stable ecosystems. This is important for the production of fermented foods as well as for gaining insight into how microbial ecosystems interacts with hosts (e.g. gut bacterial ecosystems and human disease development). The Nielsen lab also developed similar tools to study metabolism in many different human cells which led to several discoveries on disease development, e.g. in the transformation from a normal cell to a neoplastic cell.
