Dr Stina Simonsson (female), principal investigator (PI) and group leader at Clinical Chemistry and Transfusion Medicine at Sahlgrenska Hospital, Institute of Biomedicine at Gothenburg University (UGOT) in Sweden.
Her research interests are molecular events in medicine, primarily the rejuvenation and reprogramming of cells. In recent years the main focus has been cartilage repair in relation to osteoarthritis (OA). Simonsson obtained a MSc in Chemical Engineering at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden in 1992. She received a PhD at UGOT in 2000. The title of her thesis was Initiation of Herpes Simplex Virus DNA Replication. Simonsson went on to do postdoctoral work with Nobel laureate and Lasker Award winner Sir John Gurdon at the University of Cambridge, UK from 2000 to 2005.
During her time at the Gurdon Institute, Simonsson made the ground-breaking discovery that epigenetic DNA demethylation and the transcription factor Oct4 controls rejuvenation during somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) and key for the generation of induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells. Since 2005 Simonsson has been PI at UGOT Institute of Biomedicine, and she was appointed Associate Professor in Medical Biotechnology in Stem Cell Biology in 2011. Simonsson receives funding from Swedish Medical Research Council and Horizon 2020.
