Jesper Tegner is a Professor in Bioscience and Computer Science at KAUST and an Adjunct Chaired Strategic Professor and Director of Computational Medicine at Karolinska Institutet. He obtained the rank of chaired full professor 4.5 years after his PhD (awarded 1997). He holds three separate undergraduate degrees with majors in MedSchool, Mathematics, and Philosophy respectively. He did two years postgraduate education in pure and applied mathematics, while doing an experimental Ph.D./M.D. degree in Medicine. He was a Visiting Scientist as a Wennergren and Alfred P Sloan Fellow (USA, 1998-2001) while holding a position as an Assistant Professor of Computer Science 1998-2002 at Royal Institute of Technology. He is an ERC co-investigator (consolidator) on causal discovery and is ranked (2012) as outstanding (highest distinction) at Karolinska Institutet. He is the founder of two BioIT companies, inventor of several patents, and has served as a consultant for startups. Approximately 200 publications (H-index >40, > 10 000 citations), winner of the international DREAM competition (2008) on network inference, and in 2005 he became the winner of national award for founding the most promising company of the year.
He serves on several editorial boards including being an Associate Editor – Frontiers in Big Data – Medicine and Public Health (joint section with Machine Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence), Acting Section Editor on Clinical and Translational Systems Biology in Current Opinion on Systems Biology, Editorial Board of Complex Systems (first in the field, founded 1987 by Stephen Wolfram), Editorial Board of BMC Systems Biology, Senior Editor in Progress in Preventive Medicine, and Editorial Board of Neurology: Neuroinflammation & Neurodegeneration.
His research team targets fundamental genomics, such as the dynamical regulatory architecture of cells, and foundational machine learning and AI with special reference to causality. The applied work of the team includes translational and systems medicine targeting cancer (melanoma, breast cancer) and neurodegenerative diseases (multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer, frontal dementia). The work integrates experimental analysis with a special focus on single cell genomics and development of new bioinformatics and computational techniques to decode patterns and mechanism in data.
