I currently split my working life between my laboratories in Lund and DTU, Denmark and, although we have many synergistic technical and scientific interactions, the two laboratories have slightly different focus areas. My group in Lund focuses primarily on understanding the importance of a rare type of immune cell, called dendritic cells, in driving different types of immune responses in the intestine and how this is altered in inflammation. Here in particular, we are assessing how different subsets of dendritic cells drive distinct adaptive T cell responses and what local environmental signals may regulate these responses. In Lund I am also running a KAW project together with two other groups within the immunology section and one group at the Faculty of Science assessing the importance of these cells and other innate immune cells during bacterial infection. My laboratory in Denmark has for several years focused on analyzing human intestinal tissues, something that proved difficult to perform at LU. Here we have developed novel techniques to examine distinct immune compartments along the length of the human intestine in health and disease and were delighted to recently receive a large grant from the Helmsley Trust, USA to generate a single cell atlas of these niches in health and in Crohn's disease. The DTU lab also focuses heavily on understanding the development and function of mesenchymal stromal cells, a structural non-immune cell present in all tissues, in intestinal immune homeostasis and disease.

And now more congrats. You have made it to the fokus.se -list for the 100 most quoted Swedish scientists of medicine and life sciences! Did you know you had made it to the list? How do you feel about it?

You made it to 50th place, out of a 100. Do you have any thoughts on why your research is this interesting to your researcher colleagues? We as a group always strive to perform as impactful and stringent science as possible within the means available to us. This often entails not following the crowds and current trends but to continually push our research efforts to novel ground. Strategically we have not feared leaving areas where we have developed a strong track record if they become crowded with research groups from considerably stronger environments and with more resources than ourselves.