Since the beginning of the center, ATLAS has been searching for the right Principal Investigator in Computational Biology to join the team. ATLAS is therefore very pleased to announce that Dr. Jesper Grud Skat Madsen has been appointed as Assistant Professor in Computational Biology at the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and will join the ATLAS team. “We are thrilled to have Jesper join the team” says Center Director Susanne Mandrup. “Jesper is the ideal match, because he has both a very strong experimental background in Functional Genomics as well as superb skills in Computational Biology.
As an assistant professor Jesper will continue to focus on his development of computational methods and analytical strategies to understand the transcriptional regulation underlying the remarkable plasticity of fully differentiated tissues. In ATLAS, Jesper will collaborate with Professor Susanne Mandrup, Associate Professor Kim Ravnskjær and Associate Professor Lars Grøntved to employ advanced computational methods, such as machine learning, to identify novel patterns and rules underlying transcriptional control of tissue plasticity of adipose tissue and the liver in health and disease.
Jesper Grud Skat Madsen obtained his PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from the University of Southern Denmark in 2016 and did postdoctoral research with Professor Susanne Mandrup. In his postdoctoral research, he worked primarily as a bioinformatician analyzing and integrating multi-modal functional genomics datasets (e.g. ChIP-seq, ATAC-seq, DNase-seq, RNA-seq, Hi-C and capture Hi-C) to study the basic mechanisms underlying transcriptional regulation. He developed new computational methods to quantify nascent transcription and identify key transcriptional regulators. In June 2019, he was recruited to ATLAS as a Junior Group Leader, and now, by June 1, 2020 has taken up a position as Assistant Professor in Computational Biology affiliated with ATLAS.