Dr. Jørgen Kjems
Email: jk@mbg.au.dk
Dr. Kjems studied chemistry and physics at Aarhus University from where he received his PhD degree in field of RNA chemistry in 1989. After being a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA 1989-1990 and at MIT, Cambridge, USA 1990-1991 JK returned to Department for Molecular Biology, University of Aarhus where he became associated professor in 1994. In 2003 he was appointed as full professor in Molecular Biology and Nano Science and took part in the establishment of the Interdisciplinary Nanoscience Centre (iNANO). From 2010-2016 JK was PI for the Lundbeck Centre, LUNA, that focused on nanomedicine. In 2013 Dr. Kjems co-founded a new Center for Integrative Sequencing (iSEQ) at Aarhus University that focuses on next generation sequencing and bioinformatics analysis of sequencing and RNA profiling data. In the period of 2014-2018 he has headed the Interdisciplinary Nanoscience Centre (iNANO). iNANO is a truly interdisciplinary, physically assembled, entity at University of Aarhus with active participation of about 50 senior researchers, 60 junior researchers and 150 PhD students and from 2017 he headed the Danish National Research Foundation for Centre for Cellular Signal Patterns, CellPat. Dr. Kjems has received several prizes including the Novo Nordisk Prize in 2018. He co-founded to start-up companies Nanoference and Aloop Therapeutics focusing on RNA therapeutics. He has published around 400 international research papers that hold 35.000 citations. His research competencies include RNA drug delivery, bioimaging, RNA biomarkers and therapeutics, aptamer technology, noncoding RNA role in disease, RNA and protein-based nanotechnologies.