By Dr Helene Knævelsrud
Project Group Leader, Oslo University Hospital
Helene Knævelsrud is a project group leader at Oslo University Hospital in Oslo, Norway. She is using fruit flies, cells in culture and patient samples to understand two main questions: 1) how the cellular garbage system called autophagy is turned off, with implications for physiology and cancer development and 2) how leukemia develops. In the leukemia project, Helene’s group has generated a fruit fly model of a rare form of leukemia. For the autophagy projects, Helene is part of an interdisciplinary environment which is combining experimental biology, computer science, mathematics and music technology to understand the spatiotemporal changes in autophagy and predict how these can be optimized to prolong our health span.
In addition to her research, Helene is committed to public outreach. She has written regularly in national newspapers and presented at multiple popular science fairs. Furthermore, Helene is organizing the board of user representatives for cancer research at the CanCell Center of Excellence that she is part of. The perspective of users, patients in this case, has brought an important dimension to how Helene thinks about research. Finally, Helene am an elected member of the Young Academy of Norway where she is actively involved in developing research policy.