Speakers - Nordic Quantum Life Science Roundtable 2025
Keynote speakers
Darja Isaksson serves as a member of the Swedish government’s National Digitalization Council. She is a founder of three agencies. She has served as adviser to the Prime Minister’s Innovation Council, been recognized as one of Sweden’s most powerful opinion-makers by the financial magazine Veckans Affärer and was named one of the world’s 100 most influential people in digital government by the website Apolitical.
Göran Johansson, Full Professor in Applied Quantum Physics at Chalmers University of Technology
Since 2025, Göran is the Director of the Wallenberg Centre for Quantum Technology. He has supervised 9 PhD students to graduation and published more than 110 scientific papers in international journals, including Science, Nature and Nature Physics. He has also co-authored the Swedish popular science book “Kvantfysiken och Livet” as well as the English “Quantum Physics and Life”. Göran is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences since 2021.
Lene Oddershede, Chief Scientific Officer, Professor, Novo Nordisk Foundation.
Lene joined the Novo Nordisk Foundation in 2019 to establish and lead activities in the Nat-Tech area covering the natural- and technical sciences, this including activities relating to quantum technologies and AI. Lene is a physicist, trained also in mathematics. She is an experimentalist and at the Niels Bohr Institute she constructed the first optical tweezers manipulation facility in Scandinavia. She is an expert in the interphase between quantum and the life sciences and is key designer of the Novo Nordisk Foundation Quantum Computing Programme, of the Quantum Foundry Copenhagen, as well as of the AI and quantum dedicated super-compute facilities Gefion and Magne, respectively.
Sabrina Maniscalco, professor and CEO & Co-founder Algorithmiq, is a world-leading academic with over 20 years’ experience in quantum technology. Sabrina holds a professorship in quantum information and logic at the University of Helsinki, Finland. She is also the Vice-Director of the Finnish Centre of Excellence for Quantum Technologies and serves on several scientific advisory boards, such as the Institute for Quantum Optics and Information (Austria) and the Quantum Technology initiative at CERN. She represented Finland’s Quantum strategy at the White House in May 2022 and is recognized as one of the world’s leading experts in quantum technology. In 2024, Algorithmiq was nominated as one of the World Economic Forum Technology Pioneers.
Sara Mazur is since 2024 Executive Director of the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, Sweden’s largest private funder of research and education at Swedish universities. Mazur joined the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation 2018 as Director Strategic Research and in 2022 she was appointed Vice Executive Director. Prior to that she was Vice President and Head of Research at Ericsson, responsible for all research at Ericsson globally and leading the global research organization Ericsson Research, a position she held 2012-2018. Mazur is a member of the Board of Directors of Saab AB and of Wallenberg Investment AB.
Stian Bergeland, Senior Innovation Adviser, Nordic Innovation, is part of the team at Nordic Innovation that currently develops the organization's work on critical technologies, of which quantum technology is an integral part.
He coordinated Nordic Innovation's report on the Nordic-Baltic quantum technology ecosystem, published in June.