This year’s Arvid Carlsson Award by Sahlgrenska Science Park was awarded to Professor Jens Nielsen.
Since 2017, Sahlgrenska Science Park awards the Arvid Carlsson Award every year in September. The aim is to pay tribute to innovation, knowledge and competence in conjunction with good entrepreneurship through an award in Nobel Prize winner Arvid Carlsson’s name.
One of last year’s prize winners, Kristina Lagerstedt, 1928 Diagnostics, passed the prize on at a ceremony yesterday at the life science event Park Annual. The award was accepted on Jens Nielsen’s behalf by Florian David, Assistant Professor at Chalmers.
“I am deeply honored to receive the Arvid Carlsson Award by Sahlgrenska Science Park. Throughout my scientific career I have always been interested in entrepreneurship and making sure that our research could find applications in society,” said Jens Nielsen via a link from Copenhagen.
The cofounder of Metabogen and Elypta
The winner of Arvid Carlsson Award by Sahlgrenska Science Park 2019 is highly recognized internationally within his field. Jens Nielsen’s research, focused on systems biology, modeling of metabolism, and metabolic engineering of cell factories has created breakthrough opportunities for the industry. He is Professor at Chalmers University of Technology, where he founded the Department of Biology and Biological Engineering. He leads a group of more than 60 researchers. He is also Chief Scientific Officer at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Biosustainability, Technical University of Denmark. Since February 2019, Jens Nielsen is Director of the BioInnovation Institute in Copenhagen.
He is also the cofounder of Metabogen, a gut microbiota company and Elypta, a cancer diagnostic company.
“He is a role model in translating fundamental research into innovation and an inspiration within entrepreneurship,” said Marianne Dicander Alexandersson, chairman of Sahlgrenska Science Park and the award jury.
About Arvid Carlsson
Arvid Carlsson, born 1923, was awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine for ”discoveries concerning signal transduction in the nervous system ” in 2000. Among other things, he studied the neurotransmitters dopamine and serotonin. He shared the award with the Americans Paul Greengard and Eric R. Kandel. Arvid Carlsson’s research led to the recognition that Parkinson’s disease is caused by dopamine deficiency in some parts of the brain and subsequently to the production of Levodopa, an effective drug against this disease. Arvid Carlsson was active until 2018 in his company A. Carlsson Research at Sahlgrenska Science Park in Gothenburg.
Photo of Jens B Nielsen, Professor in Systems Biology, Chalmers University of Technology: Johan Bodell/Chalmers
