15. September 2021

Four new members appointed to the Danish National Research Foundation’s board

The Ministry of Higher Education and Science has appointed Professor Tine Brink Henriksen from Aarhus University, Professor Sirpa Jalkanen from the University of Turku in Finland, Professor Janet Thornton from the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) in the United Kingdom, and Professor Christian S. Jensen from Aalborg University to the Danish National Research Foundation’s board. The four new members will join the board on December 1, 2021.

Fra venstre: professor Christian S. Jensen, professor Janet Thornton, professor Tine Brink Henriksen og professor Sirpa Jalkanen.
From left: Professor Christian S. Jensen, Professor Sirpa Jalkanen, Professor Tine Brink Henriksen and Professor Janet Thornton. Photo: The Velux Foundation, Millenium Technology Prize, press photo from “Vidensråd for forebyggelse,” Earlham Institute.

On December 1, 2021, Professor Tine Brink Henriksen from Aarhus University, Professor Sirpa Jalkanen from the University of Turku in Finland, Professor Janet Thornton from the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) in the United Kingdom, and Professor Christian S. Jensen from Aalborg University will join the Danish National Research Foundation’s board, which consists of one chair and eight members.

The four new members were appointed by the new Minister of Science, Jesper Petersen, who recently started in his new ministerial post.

“During the appointment of the new members, it was emphasized that the candidates had to have an insight into research on an international level, and that the united board had competencies within all the main research areas as well as financial insight,” the Ministry of Higher Education and Science wrote in its press release.

Professor Tine Brink Henriksen is a chief physician, specializing in pediatrics, and an expert in the field of neonatology. She leads the Perinatal Epidemiological Research Unit at the Clinical Institute at Aarhus University. Her research areas include, among others, pregnancy, birth, and diseases of the newborn, as well as the consequences of early birth in regard to the later development of diseases.

Professor Janet Thornton is one of the world’s leading researchers in structural bioinformatics, which is an interdisciplinary research field where she uses computational methods to understand protein structure and function. She has been received numerous awards, including being named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC) in 2017.

Professor Christian S. Jensen is a computer scientist, and his research areas include, among others, spatial, geo-textual and multidimensional data. He has also been a preeminent guest professor at numerous institutions, including the Sa Shixuan International Research Center for Big Data Management and Analytics in China. Professor Jensen is also president of the Swiss research program Big Data, and a member of the Velux Foundation’s board.

Professor Sirpa Jalkanen is one of the world’s leading researchers in the area of lymphocyte migration in the human immune defense system and is currently working on developing biomedical and clinical medicine. She is a member of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters and the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. Professor Jalkanen was also awarded the Matti Äyräpää Prize in 2008.

Read more in a press release from the Ministry of Higher Education and Science (in Danish) here

Read more from Science Report (in Danish) here

Read more about the board’s chair, vice chair and other members here

 

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