Associate Professor Mette Munk Lauridsen is head of gastroenterology and hepatology research and a clinical hepatologist at the University Hospital of Southern Denmark Esbjerg. Dr. Lauridsen has been a medical doctor since 2005 and earned the Ph.D. title in 2016 from her work on brain dysfunction caused by liver disease. Dr Lauridsen’s main task in ATLAS 2.0 is to lead WP4 in collaboration with Jesper Grud Skat Madsen and to manage the PROMETHEUS study, which her group initiated in 2018 to support the clinical part of ATLAS. In the PROMETHEUS study, obese patients undergo serial liver and adipose tissue biopsies for histology and advanced genomic and cellular analysis in the ATLAS Center. The Liver Research Group Esbjerg enrolled nearly 300 patients in the PROMETHEUS Study during ATLAS 1.0, and recruitment continues throughout the ATLAS center’s lifetime.
Dr. Lauridsen is a certified research and project manager from the Copenhagen Business School (CBS) and the University of Southern Denmark (SDU), and in 2024, she will complete the Higher Ground Leadership Program at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), Richmond, Virginia (US).
In 2017, Mette Munk Lauridsen established The Liver Research Group Esbjerg, which is dedicated to patient-centered clinical and translational research in metabolically and alcohol associated liver disease. The research group currently counts nine scientists of all career stages and excels by being highly interdisciplinary and highly collaborative, and by having a well-established infrastructure to support large biobank-driven, human clinical, and translational studies. The group is based in Esbjerg, Denmark, where all the Region of Southern Denmark’s bariatric surgery takes place and where the South Danish Overweight Initiative (SDOI) screening clinic is located.
Dr Lauridsen’s primary scientific interest continues to be the impact of liver disease on cognition and quality of life, as well as disease trajectories in metabolically associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD).
