ATLAS scientist promoted to Associate Professor

As of March, 2018 Lars Grøntved is a tenured Associate Professor at the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. With his promotion secured, Lars continues his exciting research within the field of transcriptional responses and signaling networks in liver tissue upon dietary interventions. The long-term aim is to understand disease mechanisms involved in obesity related diseases such as type II diabetes and nonalcoholic steatohepatitis. In ATLAS he will, together with Professor Susanne Mandrup and Assistant Professor Kim Ravnskjær, study liver and adipose tissue plasticity in relation to diet-induced obesity and regression. This will be accomplished by combining advanced genomic technologies with tagging of specific cell types in vivo.

Lars Grøntved obtained a PhD in Molecular Biology from the University of Southern Denmark in 2008. He then continued his academic career as a postdoctoral fellow with Gordon Hager at the National Cancer Institute (NCI), National Institutes of Health (NIH), Bethesda, USA. Here he used functional genomics technology (e.g. DNase-seq and ChIP-seq) to study basic mechanisms regulating transcription factor (with a focus of Nuclear hormone receptors) interaction with chromatin. He specifically developed technology to probe for chromatin accessibility in tissue and collaborated with several NIH investigators to implement the technology. For his research at NIH he received a NCI Directors Intramural Innovation Award and a NIH Directors Award. In 2014 he joined the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at SDU as an Assistant Professor. His research is funded by grants from SDU2020, the Danish Diabetes Academy, the Lundbeck Foundation, the Novo Nordisk Foundation, the Independent Research Fund Denmark (Sapere Aude starting grant), and as of recently the Danish National Research Foundation.