Meet new KI-affiliated SciLifeLab and DDLS Fellows

Tell us about yourself and your research

My name is Shirin Ahmadi. Building on my background in neglected tropical diseases, my research group will focus on the discovery and development of biotherapeutics against infectious diseases, including antimicrobial-resistant bacterial infections. 

I will start in January 2027 as a group leader at the Division of Clinical Microbiology, Department of Laboratory Medicine.

How did you feel when you learned you were selected as one of our new SciLifeLab Fellows?

I vividly remember the day. I was working in a GMO lab, so I had left my phone in the office. When I came back, I saw a missed call, and right after, the same number called me again. When I picked up, it was Martin Bergö, the Vice President of KI, congratulating me on being selected as a new SciLifeLab Fellow. I was touched both by the news and by the fact that he picked up the phone himself to tell me. It meant a lot.

Which SciLifeLab infrastructure or technologies will you be working with?

I am very much looking forward to using the Drug Discovery, Spatial Omics, and Bioinformatics infrastructures at SciLifeLab Campus Solna. Using these technologies, I will launch antibody discovery campaigns against bacterial virulence factors while gaining a deep understanding of the role these virulence factors play in pathology at the molecular and tissue level. 

Tell us about your favorite scientific discovery (by someone else than yourself) and favorite scientist

I recently had the pleasure of meeting Professor Serge Muyldermans in person. In his inspiring storytelling way, he described how they accidentally discovered camelid heavy-chain antibodies (nanobodies) and how they transformed this serendipity into the streamlined technology now used for nanobody discovery and development. I had read the story before, but it was way more inspiring hearing it from the discoverer himself. It has become my most recent favorite scientific discovery.

If I must name only one favorite scientist, Virginia Apgar, the inventor of the Apgar score (a rapid assessment tool to evaluate the health of newborns immediately after birth), is the one who comes to mind. As it is often said: “Every baby born in a hospital anywhere in the world is first seen through the eyes of Dr. Virginia Apgar.” 

So much about her is truly inspiring: her multipotentiality (violinist, MD, educator, and public health advocate), the hardships in her personal life (losing one brother to tuberculosis and seeing the other live with chronic illness), her perseverance (supporting herself through scholarships and jobs throughout her studies), and her determination against all limitations (becoming an anesthesiologist instead of a surgeon due to limited career prospects for women in surgery). And then there is her revolutionizing influence on neonatal medicine through a “simple” tool, reminding us that sometimes only a different approach toward the problem is the key, not necessarily a complicated or advanced technology.

Tell us about yourself and your research

I am Florian Rosenberger. I set up my group at Karolinska Institutet, Department of Medical Biochemistry and Biophysics (MBB) in August 2025, so we just celebrated our first year’s anniversary. Parts of our instrumentation are at SciLifeLab Solna Alfa-1. Read more here

We study tissue architecture, and particularly those cases where every cell has its own proteome composition. To do so, we develop and apply a spatial proteomics technology called Deep Visual Proteomics, where we cut out single cells with a laser and measure their proteome by mass spectrometry.

How did you feel when you learned you were selected as one of our new SciLifeLab Fellows?

I have always been a great fan of SciLifeLab. The community is fantastic, and I love the technology development vibe for the purpose of solving tough bioscience questions. When I became a SciLifeLab Fellow, I was overjoyed as it opens the door to contributing and working more closely with the community.

Which SciLifeLab infrastructure or technologies will you be working with?

We develop methods for single-cell mass spectrometry technologies, so we are naturally in contact with the Global Proteomics core. Our methods are also very modular, so we work with the strong spatial community at SciLifeLab (In Situ Sequencing, Spatial Proteomics, Spatial Mass Spectrometry) to build data stacks on the same cell.

Tell us about your favorite scientific discovery (by someone else than yourself) and favorite scientist

I take inspiration from the citizen science work in Emma Lundberg’s lab. A classic is the 2018 Nature Biotech paper where they integrated an image-classification task into the video game EVE Online. I like that paper because it is genuinely out-of-the-box! As for a favorite scientist, there are a couple of people to take inspiration from. As a high-school student, I admired Ada Yonath, who received a Nobel Prize in 2009 for the ribosome structure. Her persistence was one of the reasons I wanted to become a scientist myself.

Tell us about yourself and your research

I am David Marlevi and I develop and work with so called data-driven precision imaging; that is, I combine advanced medical imaging techniques with bioengineering-based image analysis to advance our understanding of clinical disease, as well as to enhance the diagnostic abilities of current clinical imaging systems. A particular focus has been on assessing cardiovascular disorders, with applications spanning the heart, aorta, and brain. 

I’ll be starting on 1 January 2027, leading the Translational Cardiovascular Imaging team within the Department of Molecular Medicine and Surgery (MMK).

How did you feel when you learned you were selected as our new DDLS Fellow?

Beyond thrilled! I feel truly honored to get the chance to join the DDLS community. Likewise, I am also very grateful to be able to take part in and contribute to the transdisciplinary work that DDLS represents. I can’t wait to get started. I can’t wait to see what we’ll be able to within the DDLS program. And I especially can’t wait to celebrate with my amazing team!

Which SciLifeLab infrastructure or technologies will you be working with?

I am currently exploring NBIS and the AIDA data hub, but hoping to deepen image-to-biology couplings through global and spatial omics techniques in the future.

Tell us about your favorite scientific discovery (by someone else than yourself) and favorite scientist

Having been fortunate enough to meet him in person, it’s hard to not mention Torsten Wiesel. An inspiration!