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As a doctoral student, Per Uhlén, Professor of Dynamic Imaging of Intracellular Signalling at the Department of Medical Biochemistry and Biophysics, discovered that the calcium concentration in cells can fluctuate at a certain frequency, roughly like a radio signal. He is now trying to understand the meaning of these signals for the healthy and diseased body.

Myocardial infarction in people with healthy coronary arteries is far more common than once thought. Much remains unknown about the causes, diagnosis and treatment of these infarctions, but Per Tornvall, Professor of Cardiology at the Department of Clinical Research and Education, Södersjukhuset hopes to put this right.

Carol Tishelman is an experienced KI professor although she has been recently appointed as Professor of Innovative Care at the Department of Learning, Informatics, Management and Ethics, with a newly established professorial chair funded by an endowment. She is active in research into how people experience sickness and health care – at present focusing particularly on end-of-life care.

In a newly published study, researchers at Karolinska Institutet show that the shortening of the telomeres – the caps at each end of the chromosomes in our cells – can be linked statistically to the active mechanism responsible for Alzheimer’s disease.

Sten Eirik Waelgaard Jacobsen, Professor of Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine at the Department of Medicine, Huddinge, and the Department of Cell and Molecular Biology, researches how bone marrow stem cells produce blood cells. His research involves exploring the mechanisms and regulation of healthy blood formation and the causes of diseases of the blood, such as leukaemia.

Gert Helgesson, Professor of Medical Ethics at the Department of Learning, Informatics, Management and Ethics, researches scientific and medical ethics. The issues he interrogates concern everything from how researchers present their data to the difficult decisions doctors must make on life and death.

The 2015 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded Tomas Lindahl, Paul Modrich and Aziz Sancar for having mapped, at a molecular level, how cells repair damaged DNA and safeguard the genetic information. Tomas Lindahl made these crucial discoveries, for which he is now being rewarded, at Karolinska Institutet.

Karolina Sörman is a researcher in neurobiology at the Department of Clinical Neuroscience and studies psychopathy. She thinks that the topic is often described in stereotypical terms and would like a more nuanced picture.

Welcome to a new series of interviews where our prominent researchers take centre stage. This week: an interview with Jonathan Coquet

After a detailed and lengthy investigation, the Vice-Chancellor of Karolinska Institutet has pronounced his decision on a high-profile case of claimed scientific misconduct. Vice-Chancellor Anders Hamsten has concluded that while on some points Visiting Professor Paolo Macchiarini did act without due care, it does not qualify as scientific misconduct.

Erik Norberg at the Institute of Environmental Medicine, Karolinska Institutet, is awarded the Malin and Lennart Philipson Foundation prize 2015 for his “interesting and creative studies of alternations in the metabolism in cancer cells”. The prize is awarded in alternate years at Uppsala University and Karolinska Institutet respectively.

The SciLifeLab laboratories on the Solna campus stand adjacent to the offices, and only a few paces separate Anita Aperia’s group’s white lab coats from their desks. Pernilla Lagergren and her group, on the other hand, do all their research on computers and so have no laboratory to go to.