Mathias Rask-Andersen

I am a senior researcher and research coordinator at the Division of Clinical Epidemiology, Department of Medicine Solna, Karolinska Institutet, working in Professor Ola Olén's research group. My research focuses on using large-scale health data to understand disease risk, disease progression, and treatment outcomes.

My current research focuses particularly on inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), including treatment effectiveness and long-term outcomes, difficult-to-treat IBD, and the development and validation of clinically relevant disease phenotypes using Swedish nationwide registers.

I also have a background in genetic and molecular epidemiology and work with large population-based resources, including UK Biobank, to investigate biomarkers, risk factors, and potential therapeutic targets across complex diseases.

My current research focuses primarily on inflammatory bowel disease and clinical epidemiology. At the Division of Clinical Epidemiology, I work with population-based studies using Swedish national health registers, the Swedish Quality Register for Inflammatory Bowel Disease (SWIBREG), and linked clinical and laboratory data.

Current research includes studies of treatment effectiveness and safety, difficult-to-treat IBD, long-term disease outcomes, and very early-onset IBD. I am also involved in the development and coordination of research infrastructures for large-scale register-based IBD research and in both academic and collaborative real-world evidence studies.

My previous and ongoing research has given me broad experience in the analysis of large-scale biomedical datasets. This includes work in the UK Biobank integrating genetic, biomarker, imaging, lifestyle and longitudinal health data, as well as the application of statistical and machine-learning methods to risk prediction and epidemiological research.

Another longstanding research interest is the relationship between human genetics and pharmacology. I have worked on systematic evaluations of drug targets and the extent to which genetic evidence can inform drug development, efficacy and safety. This work has involved large-scale integration of genetic association data with information on pharmacological targets and therapeutic indications.

My broader methodological interests include pharmacoepidemiology, genetic epidemiology, causal inference, survival analysis, prediction modelling, and the integration of clinical and population-based data.

I teach genetics, pharmacology, neuroscience and precision medicine and supervise students in biomedical and medical research projects.

I have been involved in teaching at Uppsala University and SLU and have completed university-level academic teacher training. My teaching interests include human genetics, molecular pharmacology, genetic epidemiology and precision medicine.