I Studied Biomedicine and obtained my PhD in 2015 at Linköping University, Sweden, in the field of reproductive immunology under the mentorship of Prof. Jan Ernerudh. My doctoral thesis focused on the role of macrophages in maintaining immune tolerance at the fetal-maternal interface during early human pregnancy. Along my thesis work I grew an interest in the field of tumor immunology, which shares many similarities with reproductive immunology; for instance, features that are beneficial in the utero-placental microenvironment are commonly exploited by malignancies to avoid anti-tumor immunity. In 2016 I joined the lab of Dr Joshua Brody at the Tisch Cancer Institute and Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York as a postdoctoral fellow to work on the development of lymphoma immunotherapies.
One of the main research areas in the lab was the development of in situ vaccination, a vaccine that is created at the tumor site in cancer patients. During my postdoc, in collaboration with the lab of Dr Garcia-Sastre, we started exploring the use of oncolytic viruses that in addition to actively lysing tumor cells have the potential to induce anti-tumor immunity. Thanks to generous starting grants from the Swedish Research Council, the Swedish Society for Medical Research and Cancerfonden, in 2024 I was able to start building a research group where we can continue exploring the role of the immune system in the development of lymphomas and other cancers and use this knowledge to develop and improve cancer immunotherapies.
