Management
Anders Grøn
Chief Executive Officer
Anders Grøn became Clinical Microbiomics' CEO in 2021. Anders came from a position as Group Vice President of IFF (prev. Dupont), and global leader for IFF Health, including the activities within probiotics, Human Milk Oligosaccharides and other microbiome focused solutions. Before that, Anders held leading positions at Coloplast and Chr. Hansen. Anders Grøn leads the continued development of Clinical Microbiomics, focusing on global expansion and scientific leadership within the microbiome field.
Henrik Bjørn Nielsen, PhD
Chief Scientific Officer
Bjørn, PhD, is Chief Scientific Officer (CSO) at Clinical Microbiomics. Bjørn is part of the leadership team together with the CEO and CFO. He is responsible for directing the science team and our scientific innovation. Moreover, Bjørn oversees all client projects. Bjørn has an outstanding background as both group-leader at the Technical University of Denmark and has been a frontrunner in the field of microbiome research for more than a decade. He has published more than 20 high-visibility publications within the microbiome field, covering biomedical discoveries and a series of key analysis concepts for microbiome data. Bjørn has extensive expertise in analyzing, integrating and managing diverse types of data. With his experience and innovative mindset, Bjørn has played a key role in establishing Clinical Microbiomics as the leading CRO for advanced microbiome analysis.
Henrik Knudsen
Chief Financial Officer
Chief Operating Officer
Business Development & Commercial Team
Klaus Gamst Hansen
VP & BU Leader, CRO Business Activities
+45 9351 1254 klaus@clinical-microbiomics.comKlaus Gamst Hansen
VP & BU Leader, CRO Business Activities
Klaus joined Clinical Microbiomics when the company was founded in 2015. He has a background within commercialization and start-up analytical work in Danish consultancy company TTO (part of Plougmann Vingtoft). Klaus' responsibilities include sales, marketing and communication activities combined with work in business development, competitive intelligence, representing the company at conferences and building partnerships and collaborations across the EU and US. Klaus holds a MSc in Medical Biology and Communication Studies from Roskilde University.
Jacob Bak Holm, PhD
VP & BU Leader, Discovery Business Activities
Jacob is involved in our studies from the very beginning to end. He is in charge of our internal project development such as our Skin Microbiome Platform including both skin-optimized laboratory protocols and data analysis. His area of expertise is the microbiome in relation to host, metabolism, immune response and pathogens. Jacob also has experience with a broad variety of animal and human studies focusing on how diet, pathogens, diseases, prebiotics and probiotics modulate the gut microbiota and what potential functional consequences this can have for the host. Jacob holds a MSc in Molecular Biomedicine from the University of Copenhagen and a PhD in Laboratory of Genomics and Molucular Biomedicine from the Institute of Biology at University of Copenhagen. He became part of our team in November 2016.
Marianne Koliana, PhD
VP, Business Development
Marianne holds a PhD in Clinical Medicine Research at Imperial College London and a master in Molecular Biotechnology from Lund Technical University in Sweden. During her PhD, Marianne studied the gut-lung axis and the effect of gut microbial metabolites on the airway epithelium and microbiota in asthmatics, and metabolic profiling to identify potential biomarkers that could aid the diagnoses of asthma. Marianne's solid knowledge in microbiomics makes her a strong addition to our sales team which she joined in November 2019.
Heidi Hau, PhD
VP, Scientific Affairs & Partnerships
Heidi leads our business and scientific activities in the US, including development strategies, external partnerships and CRO organization and execution. Heidi holds a PhD in microbiology and immunology and has worked across scientific and business development groups directing global innovation and leading technical due diligence for external partnerships within microbiological and molecular-based technologies. Most recently, Heidi led key initiatives at Rebiotix (a Ferring company) to expand investigational microbiota-based drug platforms for the treatment of infectious and chronic diseases.
Nynne Nielsen
Director, Project Portfolio Management
Nynne is working in our laboratory with our pipeline for DNA extraction from very beginning to end. She takes part in our innovation projects such as optimizing extraction protocols for various types of skin samples. Nynne holds a BSc and a MSc in Molecular Biomedicine from University of Copenhagen. During her research she has been working with bacterial interactions in multispecies biofilms and applied modelling approaches to study the interspecies interactions in biofilms relevant for industrial food facilities. Nynne Joined our team in September 2017.
Athanasia Boulakou
Director, Head of Clinical RA & QA
Nassia holds a Pharmacy degree and a Msc in Pharmaceutical Sciences from University of Copenhagen. She has a solid in-depth professional experience within clinical regulatory affairs during her long professional experience in the pharmaceutical industry. Nassia’s expertise include drug development and regulatory approval processes from product development to registration, including direct contact with regulatory authorities in the US, EU and Japan. As regulatory affairs manager, Nassia will support you by ensuring that all our microbiome data deliverables meet the regulatory submission requirements and so bringing your microbiome products, or microbiome targeting products, to market. Nassia joined our team in March 2021.
Milda Christensen
Manager, Business Development
Milda is part of our sales and business development team. She help us meet the growing interest for our microbiome analysis services for clinical studies. Before joining our team, Milda worked as part of the ELC GROUP - a global provider of regulatory pharma services - supporting clinical and pharmacovigilance projects of global pharmaceutical companies. Milda holds a MSc in Skin Sciences and Regenerative Medicine from the University of Bradford (EU Center for Skin Sciences).
Jessica Lin
Manager, Business Development
Jessica is part of our Business Development team, predominantly working with population health studies and microbiome cohorts. She has a degree in Biopharmaceutical Sciences from the University of Ottawa, and brings a wealth of knowledge about microbiome sample collections from her previous job at DNA Genotek Inc. Jessica is happy to help you with study planning from sample collection to a custom analysis plan for your projects.
Mathilde Pinon
Manager, Global Marketing
Mathilde joined our team in 2022, to manage all marketing and communication activities. She studied biochemistry, and holds a MSc in Food Sciences and Nutraceuticals Engineering from the University of Rennes. New to the microbiome field, Mathilde gained marketing experience in the nutrition and food supplements industries, notably working for Kappa Bioscience, and Chr. Hansen. She is the right contact for all media enquiries.
Science Team
Nikolaj Sørensen, PhD
VP, Operations
Nikolaj is involved throughout the whole timeline of our client's projects. He has a key role in our quality assurance and is responsible for and has also designed our Q&A system from which we received the ISO 17025 certification in the beginning of 2018. Nikolaj has a string ecological background with extensive knowledge in molecular analysis of microorganisms allowing him to gain deep insight into the microbial world. His specialized area of expertise include finding linkage between nutrition, diseases and the gut microflora. Nikolaj holds PhD from the University of Copenhagen. This research focused in microbial ecology from the Center for Macroecology, Evolution and Climate. Nikolaj has been part of the team since 2016.
Aron Eklund, PhD
VP, Technology
Aron has a key role in developing our bioinformatics pipelines and workflows. He is involved in client project management and performing statistical analysis. Aron has specialized expertise in development and application of cutting-edge genomics and computational methods for cancer diagnosis, personalized treatment, and target discovery of immuntherapy. This includes methods to infer homologous recombination, DNA repari deficiency, tumor copy number profiles, and the origin of metastatic cancers of unknown primary, as well as methods to both predict and experimentally validate tumor neoantigens. Aron holds a MSc in Biology from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a PhD in Systems Biology from the Technical University of Denmark. He became part of our team in August 2017.
Timo Kern, PhD
VP, Lab Operations & Technologies
Timo's expertise is the bridging between our laboratory processes and bioinformatic analysis. He is leading our microbiome projects from beginning to end. Timo has acquired extensive experience in planning and performing large-scale studies exploring the global human microbiome and human genetics; managing both the technical challenges of the wet lab and the analysis of high-dimensional sequencing data. Timo holds a MSc in Molecular Biology from the University of Frankfurt and a PhD from the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Basic Metabolic Research. During his PhD, Timo was particularly interested in exploring host-microbiome interactions and the influence of metabolic diseases, lifestyle, and other environmental factors of the human gastrointestinal microbiome. Moreover, he studied the role of the oral microbiome in the pathogenesis of metabolic disorders and liver diseases. He joined our team in January 2019. 
Helle Pedersen, PhD
Director, Integrative Systems Biology
Helle is one of our bioinformatics specialists specialized in integrative systems biology approached in type 2 diabetes and related disorders. Helle holds a PhD in integrative systems biology in type 2 diabetes from the Center for Biological Sequence Analysis at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU). Moreover, a master’s degree in Systems Biology also from the DTU.
Josef Vogt, PhD
Director, Integrative Systems Biology
Josef holds a PhD in bioinformatics from the Center for Biological Sequence Analysis at the Technical University of Denmark (DT) and a MSc in biotechnology from DTU. Josef is an experienced bioinformatician specialized in integrative systems biology focusing on investigating interactions between the host and microbiome by applying data integration and machine learning methods in disorders such as type 1 and type 2 diabetes.
Thorsten Brach, PhD
Senior Scientist, Microbiome
Thorsten is an experienced microbiome scientist and his competences bridge lab and bioinformatics which will be instrumental for your absolute microbiome abundance profiling offerings and much more. He holds a bachelor and a master's degree in molecular biotechnology from the University og Heidelberg in Germany. During his PhD he studied the regulation of vesicular trafficking pathways, endocytosis and autophagy, at EMBL. He continued his career at CBMR at University of Copenhagen after receiving a Marie Curie Individual Fellowship to investigate age-associated changes in the way our immune system reacts to gut microbes. At CBMT he further studied the role of gut microbes in cirrhosis progression as part of the European liver disease consortia. Thorstens research has contributed to well-cited scientific publications in the field of redox biology, vesicular trafficking and gut microbiome research. He joined our team in November 2019.
Oksana Lukjancenko, PhD
Senior Bioinformatician, Microbiome
Oksana works as science lead for many of our shotgun metagenomics projects where she is responsible for performing bioinformatics analyses and visualization of the results. Oksana holds a PhD in Microbial Comparative Genomics from the Technical University of Denmark (DTU). She is specialized in the global surveillance of infectious diseases and antimicrobial resistance. Moreover, she holds a master’s degree of Science in Biotechnology also from DTU. She joined our team in April 2018.
Albert Pallejà Caro, PhD
Senior Bioinformatician, Microbiome
Albert is one of our bioinformatics specialists carrying out mainly shotgun metagenomics projects, from QC processing of the sequencing reads and data crunching to statistical analysis and visualization of results. Albert has led various shotgun metagenomics studies characterizing the effects of interventions targeting directly or indirectly the human, pig or mice gut microbiota. He is specialized in the effects of antibiotic treatment of the gut microbiota and in the resistome (understood as collection of antibiotic resistance genes) characterization. Besides this, Albert has broad expertise within several disciplines of bioinformatics including comparative genomics, human protein networks related to human disease and omics integration. Albert holds a PhD in Bacterial Genomics and a MSc in Chemistry and Biochemistry, both from the University Rovira i Virgili in Tarragona, Catalunya. He became part of our team in May 2017.
Pernille Myers, PhD
Senior Bioinformatician, Microbiome
Pernille is one of our young talented PhD students from the Technical University of Denmark (DTU). She is working with us as a bioinformatics specialist developing our SNV-level resolution pipeline for tracking therapeutic microbes in intervention studies and our metagenomic species database for the infant gut microbiome. In her PhD research, she studies the development of the gut microbiome of small children, how it interacts with the immune system and how this may lead to childhood obesity or allergies. Pernille is dedicated to developing ultra-high-ressolution methodologies for analyzing the gut microbiome. Pernille holds a Mac in Bioinformatics Engineering and Systems Biology also from DTU. She joined our team as a master thesis student in August 2016.
Gustav Lindved
Senior Bioinformatician, Innovation
Gustav works on our internal bioinformatic projects. This could be examining different ways of detecting bacteriophages in the human microbiome. Gustav holds a bachelor’s degree in Biotechnology from the Technical University of Denmark and a MSc in Bioinformatics and Systems Biology also from DTU which is very focused on statistics, machine learning and modelling. He joined our team in 2018 to write his bachelors thesis.
Joachim Johansen, PhD
Senior Bioinformatician, Innovation
Joachim holds a PhD in Biostatistics and Bioinformatics from the University of Copenhagen / Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Research (NNFCPR), where he developed computational methods for studying the bacterial and viral kingdoms in metagenomics. During his PhD, Joachim was a visiting researcher at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. He worked with us as a bioinformatics student assistant during his Master’s degree in 2018, and came back to work with us. He will work on further developing and expanding our computational metagenomics infrastructure as part of our innovation team.
Jakob Russel, PhD
Senior Scientist, Innovation
Jakob holds a PhD in microbiome ecology and bioinformatics from the University of Copenhagen. He joins us as Senior Scientist, part of the Innovation team. Jakob will initially focus on gene neighbourhood-aware functional annotation and ultra-high resolution phylogenetic analysis.
Janne Marie Moll
Microbiome scientist
Janne is an experienced microbiome scientist and bioinformatician with a wet-lab background. Janne is specialized in immunology and host-microbiome interactions, particularly in the early-life microbiota and its role in host health. Janne holds a MSc in Systems Biology and Bioinformatics and a PhD in gut microbiome regulation of host metabolism and immunity, both from the Technical University of Denmark. Janne joined our team in March 2022.
Paula Rodríguez García
Bioinformatics Specialist
Paula joined our team back in December 2019 as a student assistant while she was completing her master's studies. In the summer of 2021 she joined the Bioinformatics team full-time. Paula works on developing and maintaining our bioinformatic tools, such as our microbiome analysis framework and our machine learning pipeline. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Biotechnology from the Technical University of Madrid and a Master of Science in Bioinformatics and Systems Biology from the Technical University of Denmark.
Maria Novosolov
Data Scientist
Maria is our Data Scientist. She works on developing our data analysis pipeline and implementing new data solutions. She holds a PhD in macroecology from Tel Aviv University and conducted postdoctoral research in bioinformatics at University of Copenhagen, focusing on population genomics.
Alexander Guðjónsson
Biostatistics Scientist
Alexander Guðjónsson has a Master’s degree in biostatistics from ETH Zurich. He initially focused on human genetics, but shifted his focus after realizing that our microbiome, rather than our own genome, is likely to be a key driver of medical advancements in the future and key to unlocking the potential of personalized medicine. Alexander will be supporting our clients as microbiome scientist and consulting statistician.
Roosa Varjus
Bioinformatics Assistant
Roosa supports the Data Science and Automation team. She works with developing and maintaining our critical data science infrastructure and optimising our data analysis pipelines. She is currently studying for an MSc in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology at University of Copenhagen. She holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Biomedicine from University of Turku, Finland.
Dennis Pohl
PhD Student
Dennis is one of our young talented PhD students working with us while doing his PhD in collaboration with the Technical University of Denmark (DTU). He is part of the prestigious EU Horizon 2020 Best Treat Programme aiming at developing new diagnostics and treatments for non-alcoholic fatty lever diseases (NAFLD). The purpose of Dennis' research is to identify microbiome keystone-species for the systems diversity, stability of human health from longitudinal microbiome data. For this, Dennis will develop a framework for estimating microbial persistence and colonization probabilities. Also, he works on identifying metabolic disease related strains from meta-omic data analysis. Dennis holds a MSc in Bioinformatics and is doing his PhD research at DTU Biosustain department. In his master theses, Dennis estimated the impact of a 6-day course of antibiotic treatment on bacterial replication rates in a metagenomics time-series experiment.
Sara Pita
PhD student
Sara Pita is a PhD student at Clinical Microbiomics affiliated to the Technical University of Denmark (DTU). She’ll be working on identifying microbiome-based targets of clinical relevance as part of the Marie Curie ITN PEST-BIN. Her PhD project is titled Phenotype predictions using machine learning and ultra-high resolution microbiomics. The project aims to utilize ultra-high resolution – strain-level base-pair resolution - microbiomics data to predict microbiome characteristics (e.g. alpha diversity) and host phenotypes (e.g. disease presence). Here, strain-level metagenomic analyses enable the dissection of detailed functional information from the gut microbiome as well as its interactions. Prior to commencing this PhD, she completed an MSc in Quantitative Genetics at the University of Edinburgh, and then, worked for 2 years as a computational research assistant within an early cancer detection lab – the Massie lab.
Abril Diosdado Hernandez
Bioinformatics Student Assistant
Abril supports the Operations team as student assistant. She’s currently studying her MSc in Bioinformatics and Systems Biology at the Technical University of Denmark. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Biotechnology with specialization in Molecular Biology from Tecnológico de Monterrey (ITESM).
Stefanos Rodopoulos
Bioinformatics Student Assistant
Stefanos is one of our bioinformatics students. He maintains large datasets for the company's Discovery department while also developing fresh methods for data exploration, visualization, and prediction. With a firm knowledge of mathematical algorithms and statistical modeling, he is also assisting with novel approaches to use cutting-edge deep learning models. He joined our team in June 2022.
William Hagedorn-Rasmussen
Bioinformatics Student Assistant
William is a student assistant who supports the Operations team. He is working on analysis infrastructure support, bioinformatics analyses, method development, and other duties, in close collaboration with Maria Novosolov, Data Scientist. His passion for programming started during his bachelor in Human Life Science at DTU with a focus on bioinformatics. Looking for ways to apply it to Human Health, he is continuing his studies at DTU through a Master in Bioinformatics and Systems Biology.
Laboratory Team
Priya Sivarajah
Laboratory Coordinator
Priya is part of our Laboratory Team, with the overall responsibility of managing our laboratory operations. Before she joined our team in late 2020, she had experience from Gentofte Hospital for 4,5 years, where she worked in the laboratory with sample analysis, hematologic procedures, coagulation tests, blood chemistry tests and parathyroid operations where she had the responsibility for ELISA. Furthermore, she is an experienced phlebotomist. Priya holds a Bachelor in Biomedical Laboratory Science from University College Copenhagen, Metropol.
Aleksandra Kociolek
Laboratory Scientist
Aleksandra got her Bachelor's degree in Medical Biotechnology at the Medical University of Lodz, Poland, and her Master's degree in Genetics at the University of Lodz, Poland. Her major interest during the studies was analyzing ancient DNA, she, therefore, focused her thesis on this topic. Before joining Clinical Microbiomics in September 2021, Aleksandra used to work in a histopathological laboratory and in a Covid19 diagnostic laboratory first in Poland, and then since April 2021 in DTU in Denmark.
Jin Cui
Biomedical Laboratory Scientist
Jin completed her Master’s in Plant Science form the University of Copenhagen, where she got experience in the laboratory with one paper published as the first author. She has extensive experience working in the biotechnology industry. Before Jin joined our team, she worked at BGI Europe A/S for two years as a Research Scientist, focused on DNA extraction, library construction for NGS and protocol optimization. Jin joins our laboratory team performing analysis of the microbiome or related research on behalf of clients, documenting research in report and presentations.
