Department of Clinical Neuroscience

How is valence coded in the sense of smell? The neural mechanisms behind why one likes or dislikes a smell.
The sense of smell's primary function is to judge whether an odor smells good or bad (ie determine the valence of the odor). This enables us to make important decisions about approaching or avoiding the smell (eg avoiding rotten food).

Professor Lisa Thorell receives a grant from Forte for the project "Relation between digital media and young children's development: A longitudinal project from pregnancy to 2 years of age. The grant is 5 million over three years and the project will be run in collaboration with assistant professor Anett Sundqvist at Linköping University.

KI researcher Arvid Guterstam receives the SSMF Starting Grant 2025 for the project "Artificial sensory modality for tactile perception others’ attention: A novel intervention for improving social cognition in autism?". The grant amounts to six million SEK over five years.

Karolinska Institutet researcher Gustav Nilsonne receives funding from Horizon Europe for the project "IP4OS - Unpacking the possibilities of Intellectual Properties for Open Science". The project consortium will receive 1.9 million Euros over two years, of which 270,000 Euros will go to Karolinska Institutet.

The University Management visited CNS as part of their tour to meet all of KI’s Departments.

During the visit, our Department Board and a few representatives from the organization had the opportunity to meet with President Annika Östman Wernerson, University Director Veronika Sundström, Vice-president Martin Bergö and Dean Carl Johan Sundberg.

People with OCD die on average nine years earlier than others. Now, a registry study spanning 40 years reveals the diseases and health risks behind these grim statistics.

Read more in Lorena Fernandez de la Cruz´s article in The Conversation. 

"How fair are we truly? And under which circumstances do we offer others a fair share of the cake? Neuroscientific research has started revealing answers. Our team used electric brain stimulation on 60 volunteers to figure out which parts of the brain were involved." 

Find out more in the article written by Patricia Christian from CNS Division of Psychology. 

In a study published in Nature Communications, Berglund et al. (Maja Jagodics' group), discovered an autophagy- and interleukin-34-dependent neuroprotective microglia population exclusive to the aged brain suggesting a potential treatment target for neuroinflammatory diseases.

Eye specialist and cancer researcher Gustav Stålhammar, together with researchers at St. Erik's Eye Hospital and the Karolinska Institutet, in an international collaboration, has developed a new and better classification of the aggressive eye cancer uveal melanoma. The study is published in the respected journal Ophthalmology.

Erik is director of studies at the department of psychology, he is a psychologist, PhD, docent in clinical psychology at the Karolinska Institutet and chairman of the Swedish Association of Clinical Psychologists.

This year's KLOK award goes to the Optometry program, which together with the St. Erik Eye Hospital has developed a clinical training clinic where students from several educational programs can broaden and deepen their knowledge in an interprofessional learning environment.The clinical training clinic is a collaboration between KI and St.Erik Eye Hospital where different professions together supervise students from a number of educational programs in an interprofessional learning environment.

Simon Jangard, psychologist and doctoral student at CNS where he divides his time between the Division of Psychology and the Centre for Psychiatry Research, is awarded this year's Jörgen Engel scholarship for an article in which he investigated a number of different aspects of social decision-making in young people with alcohol use syndrome.