Gunilla Karlsson Hedestam

I received my BSc from Uppsala University in 1990 and my PhD (DPhil) from the University of Oxford in 1993. Between 1994 and 1998, I was a post-doctoral fellow at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute at Harvard Medical School in Boston, after which I worked in the Biotech sector for 3 years. I then returned to Sweden and Karolinska Institutet where I became an Associate Professor in 2004 and a tenured Professor in 2012. I currently hold a Distinguished Professor grant from the Swedish Research Council, grants from the NIH and the EU H2020 program, an ERC Advanced grant and a Wallenberg Scholar grant.

Infection Immunology and Immunogenetics

Our research focuses on the genetic basis for adaptive immune responsesv with a focus on B and T cell receptors. In several projects, we define antibody responses at the clonal level by single-cell sorting memory B cells for sequence analysis of antibody V(D)J transcripts and for isolation of antigen-specific monoclonal antibodies. We also apply next generation sequencing to analyze expressed immune repertoires and to trace specific antibody lineages to understand their fate and levels of affinity maturation. Because V(D)J gene assignment is a critical first step of lineage tracing, and there is considerable genetic variation in germline V genes/alleles between subjects, we developed a computational tool that allows the generation of individualized germline V gene databases, IgDiscover. This is a major technical advance that will enable the use of individualized germline databases to become a standard element of high quality immunological studies in both humans and experimental animals. By applying these methods we obtain highly detailed information about antigen-specific immune responses and about how outbred species differ in their antibody VDJ germline gene segments and hence the formation of naive B cell repertoires.