News archive

From the autumn semester of 2025, KI offers a new international master’s programme in global health. The programme comprises 120 credits and has 30 study places. Application for course responsibility is now open.

We are approaching summer, and we kindly ask you to read the information below carefully. Take notice of the deadlines both regarding HR and Finance.

A study conducted in collaboration with the National Center for Suicide Research and Prevention (NASP) has examined an association between screen time spent on social media, anxiety, and self-esteem among elementary school girls in Stockholm County.

Tips from KI Grants Office about current calls.

Karolinska Institutet has signed a memorandum of understanding with the pharmaceutical company Chiesi, which has an office and laboratory facility in KI Science Park. The parties have agreed to strengthen efforts that can accelerate research and development in areas such as respiratory diseases, rare diseases, and neonatology.

In line with the FAIR principles and the national guidelines for an open science system, KI has made a formal decision that KI actively shall contribute to open access to research data.

During the spring, the university management visited the departments to learn more about the various activities and to strengthen the internal dialogue. On 8 May 2024, they were welcomed by our management team.

The storage volumes for Swedish universities' user licences with Microsoft have changed - now these new volumes will apply at KI.

On Thursday May 16, KI Housing will start using a Case Management System.

Welcome to the two-day symposium ”Astrocytes in Brain Function and Disease” at Nobel Forum, Campus Solna on June 10-11, 2024. Interesting speakers from all over the world participate. See full program below. Register no later than May 20!

As the buds have burst and the traditional Swedish spring songs have been sung, we are approaching graduation. On Thursday and Friday, May 30 and 31, the graduation ceremonies for all KI’s study programmes will be held. Get inspiration from four of the graduating students’ memories and plans.

Three researchers at the Department of Medicine, Huddinge (MedH) have been awarded grants from the Dr Åke Olsson Foundation for research in haematology. The foundation supports haematology researchers at Karolinska Institutet, who are at an important but early stage of their research.

Jan Sjövall passed away on 2 May 2024, at the age of 95. Jan was professor emeritus at Karolinska Institutet having moved to Stockholm from Lund in 1958 as part of Sune Bergström’s group. Besides his family, Jan had two great loves - bile acid analysis and golf, being good enough at golf to regularly represent Sweden in age group competitions. With respect to bile acid analysis he was “simply the best”.

The hall at the Swedish Society of Medicine in Stockholm was buzzing with people and conversations when the Association, along with the Centre for Health Crises at KI, organised a seminar on attacks on healthcare in conflicts and war on Thursday 2 May 2024. Those who could not make it to the capital participated online. Presentations and panel discussions with experts and health professionals working in war zones highlighted the important issue from various perspectives.

This is a summary of the digital information meeting that prof Maria Eriksdotter, head of the project steering group, together with the departmental head of MedH and the Director of Doctoral studies at MedH held on 7 May addressing all staff at BioNut and MedH.

It’s time once again to vote for faculty representatives for the Karolinska Institutet Board, the university’s supreme decision-making body. All staff, students and affiliates of KI are invited to nominate candidates between 14 and 28 May. Here, sitting faculty representatives give some tips on what to expect and hope to inspire their successors.

Danuta Wasserman, professor of psychiatry and suicidology at the National Centre for Suicide Research and Prevention (NASP) and chair of the World Psychiatric Association (WPA), participates in an interview with the Spanish daily newspaper El Pais – in a discussion about the increasing mental health problems, suicide, and the global challenges we face.

MFS is a Sida-funded scholarship programme for undergraduate and graduate students who wish to conduct field studies in low- and middle-income countries to gather material for their theses.

Photographer Lennart Nilsson became world famous for his images from the inside of the body. Foetuses during different stages of development and microscopically small cells could be photographed thanks to his electron microscope. Lennart Nilsson's pictures are now historic and many were taken when he worked at Karolinska Institutet.

The Global Child Health and SDGs research group is currently hosting three researchers from the HoliCare project’s African partner institutions, namely Senegal, Ethiopia and Uganda. The aim of the exchange is research capacity building of local researchers in partnership with Africa-based research institutions that are project partners.

Researchers from Karolinska Institutet, together with Pixelgen Technologies, have developed and applied a technique that makes it possible to map proteins in individual cells in a completely new way, according to a new study in Nature Methods. Not only is it now possible to measure the amount of proteins, but also how they are distributed in the cell's membrane and how they interact with each other.

Welcome to Jessica Edstorp's defence of her doctoral thesis "Infections, antibiotics, tobacco, genetic factors and risk of LADA - latent autoimmune diabetes in adults, and type 2 diabetes" at Karolinska Institutet on 17 May.

Friday, the 26 April, 150 new KI doctors and two honorary doctors were presented with their academic awards at a formal ceremony in Stockholm City Hall.

Reumatikerförbundet allocates over 15 million kronor for research on rheumatic diseases in 2024. Out of a total of 98 approved projects, 34 are located at the Karolinska Institutet, sharing six and a half million kronor.

Elena Rafetti joined the Department of Global Public Health and the PRIME group in October 2023. She has a rich experience from previous roles at the University of Cambridge, Uppsala University and PhD at KI. Elena's research focuses on the effects of climate extremes on population health. This addition to the Department brings a new perspective to the Global Public Health research.

On April 23, it was time for the new KI university management to visit NVS. They are currently on a tour visiting all departments during the late autumn 2023 and spring 2024.

Researchers from the Vascular Surgery Group at the Department of Molecular Medicine and Surgery, Karolinska Institutet, have teamed up with 20 clinical research centres, universities, professional associations, SMEs and non-profit representative organisations of civil society in a new EU Horizon Europe project NextGen, aiming to develop the next generation tools for genome-centric multimodal data integration in personlised cardiovascular medicine.

The course “Medicinpedagogiskt utvecklingsprojekt: en fördjupningskurs” supports teachers’ professional development and stimulates an academic approach to the scholarship of teaching and learning.

The StratNeuro Start-up Grant is intended to support outstanding Neuroscience researchers at the beginning of their careers. StratNeuro will allocate in total SEK 6,000,000 to fund this initiative, each project receiving SEK 500,000/year for a period of two years.

On behalf of the Swedish Gender Equality Agency, researchers Lena Dahlberg and Mariam Kirvalidze have done a scoping review of informal caregiving and loneliness. More specifically, the report examines loneliness in spousal carers aged 65 years and older, the factors that increase the risk of loneliness in this group, the consequences of loneliness, and how they themselves experience loneliness.

KI, Karolinska University Hospital and AstraZeneca are entering into a tripartite collaboration to promote the development of precision medicine in Sweden. The ambition is that patients throughout the country will have access to tailored prevention, diagnosis, treatment and follow-up.

As the numbers of pediatric brain cancer survivors continue improving, the numbers of individuals developing life-long neurocognitive impairments are consequently expected to rise.

We want to welcome Jialiang Sun Wang to our lab. Jialiang is a PhD student from University of Barcelona. He is coming to our lab for a short stay to learn the ChIPseq technique. We are looking forward to a great discussion and collaboration ahead. Welcome Jialiang!

A preclinical study from Karolinska Institutet offers hope for treating severe neurodegenerative diseases with an existing drug. The study suggests that the leprosy drug clofazimine may be effective in the treatment of Huntington’s disease.

In an article published in Nature, researchers from Karolinska Institutet present an atlas of the early development of the brain. The atlas can be used, among other things, to find out what went wrong in the development of brain tumors in children and also to find new treatments.

Last Friday, 150 new KI doctors and two honorary doctors were presented with their academic awards at a formal ceremony in Stockholm City Hall. The evening was one of stirring entertainment, academic tradition – and an academic vice president in a Barbra Streisand wig.

Researchers at Karolinska Institutet may have found a new way to treat obesity and related disorders by targeting the cells’ powerhouses, the mitochondria. A study published in Nature Metabolism shows that a specific class of drugs that block mitochondrial function can reverse diet-induced obesity, fatty liver and diabetes in mice.

Researchers at the Thoracic Surgery research group, the Department of Molecular Medicine and Surgery, have performed a study of patients who underwent bioprosthetic aortic valve replacement in Sweden between 2003 and 2018.
The study is published in JAMA Network Open and shows varying performance between different mechanical cardiac valves.

New parents were in focus when the KI Impact Challenge was arranged on a weekend, a student event to promote innovation. More than 40 students worked over two days on the challenge of improving parents' health and well-being.

For the 12th Tissue and Motion Conference, Karolinska Institutet researchers returned to Djurönäset Hotel on 16th-17th April 2024 to discuss research, network, and enjoy Stockholm’s archipelago.

Around 200 people from near and far gathered to celebrate FyFa 75 years on Tuesday 23 April. The day was characterised by togetherness, strategic and visionary talks, good food, and a positive outlook on the future.

Researchers at Karolinska Institutet have developed a web-based platform that provides a whole new insight into the human body at the cellular level. The aim is to create an invaluable resource for researchers worldwide to increase knowledge about human health and disease. The study is published in Genome Biology.

On 25 April it was eight years since Ahmadreza Djalali, Swedish citizen and doctor of disaster medicine at Karolinska Institutet, was arrested while on a visit to Iran. Karolinska Institutet’s president, Annika Östman Wernerson, and vice-president, Martin Bergö, have written an open letter to Sweden’s minister for foreign affairs and minister for education, calling on them to use all means available to increase the pressure on Iran to free Dr Djalali and other Swedish citizens.

This summer, the 27th Nordic Congress of Gerontology will take place. The theme this year is “Ageing in a Transforming World,” and the congress will be held from June 12 to 14, arranged by Karolinska Institutet (KI). It has been 20 years since it was last held in Stockholm, and the most recent time it was in Sweden was in 2014 in Gothenburg.

Cloud-based personal health records are on the rise globally. This article series introduces the concept of a GPOC of PHRs, consisting of five parts, with the current article focusing on systematic review and meta-analysis. It scrutinizes technical, computer scientific, and security-based prerequisites, analyzing twelve factors including data security, efficiency, cost, integrity, cryptography, and access.

An international research team, led by Tibor Harkany and Robert Schnell at Karolinska Institutet and MedUni Vienna's Center for Brain Research, set out to find ways of influencing hormone release to reduce stress reactions in post-traumatic stress disorder. They came across secretagogin, which regulates the release of some of the most fundamental and indispensable neurotransmitters and hormones.

In a study recently published in Nature, an international research team led by Karolinska Institutet and MedUni Vienna, addressed how and why acute heat exposure, in conditions reminiscent of a sauna session or limited exposure to the sun, leads to reduced food intake.

Neuropeptides, which are broadly considered to modulate synaptic communication, can have unique and life-long effects on brain development, particularly the wiring of neuronal circuits. Researchers at Karolinska Institutet and MedUni Vienna now show that the presence of the neuropeptide galanin during a critical window of brain development is imperative for neurons to connect efficaciously to one another. The study is published in in Nature Communications.

The 2024 Karolinska Comprehensive Cancer Centre Day draw a large number of experts in the field of cancer research from KI and Karolinska University Hospital. The theme this year was prevention, with particular attention directed to scientific advances and remaining challenges, as well as to how involving patients in prevention enhances quality of care.

The Berzelius Medal in gold from the Swedish Chemical Society is 2024 awarded to Roman Zubarev, professor of medical proteomics at the Department of Medical Biochemistry and Biophysics at the Karolinska Institutet.