Per-Olof Syrén
Associate Professor in Chemistry for Life Sciences
Docent in Biotechnology
KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden
per-olof.syren@biotech.kth.se
Per-Olof Syrén obtained his PhD in Biotechnology in 2011 from KTH. After a postdoctoral stay as an Alexander von Humboldt-fellow at the University of Stuttgart, Germany between 2011-2013 he came back to Sweden to build his own research group. Supported by a Swedish Research Council (VR) Young Investor grant (less than 5% success rate), and committed to his passion to understand fundamental biochemistry, he has built his own small and independent research group from scratch at Science for Life Laboratory in Stockholm. His research is also funded by FORMAS, KVA, ÅForsk, SLF and SSF – The Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research after being evaluated to have a great potential for our society. His projects have attracted private grants from both Sweden (Royal Academy of Sciences, Wennergren Foundation) and Germany and have won several awards, including an internationally prestigious Alexander von Humboldt award and a Gordon conference research award. He was nominated to represent the Alexander von Humboldt foundation at the Nobel Laureate meeting in Chemistry 2013 in competition with thousands of other young scientists globally. In 2019 he was awarded the the Gunnar Sundblad Research Foundation’s prestigious Skills Development Prize. The prize was awarded by His Majesty King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden.
Senior Researchers and postdocs
Antonino Biundo
PhD, Postdoctoral researcher
SciLifeLab and KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden
antonino.biundo@scilifelab.se
Ciao! My name is Antonino. I come from Italy but I spent the last 5 years in Austria working at both the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences and the Austrian Centre of Industrial Biotechnology, previously for my PhD, and afterwards as a Postdoc. My PhD project was on the optimization of enzymes in order to improve their esterase activity for polymer modification. In the meantime, I have also worked with members of the oxidoreductase family, namely laccases and tyrosinases. From March 2018 I started a postdoc position in Per-Olof’s group in Systems Biocatalysis, focusing on the biological conversion of side-streams from forestry and on the engineering and bioinformatical design of enzymes.
Wissam Farhat
PhD, Postdoctoral researcher
KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden.
wisfa@kth.se
Wissam Farhat was born and raised in a lovely town near the sea called Ansariyeh in Lebanon. He received the Bachelor degree in Biochemistry and the Master’s degree in Cancer Biology from the Lebanese University, Beirut, Lebanon, in 2013 and 2015, respectively. During his Master studies, he completed nine months of internship at the American University of Beirut (AUB) where he conducted an in vivo study aimed to highlight the effects of smoke-mediated pathology on the cardiovascular system. For professional growth as an academic scholar and researcher in science, he pursued his Doctoral studies in the area of polymer and biomaterial science, under a joint supervision between North Carolina State University, department of forest biomaterials, USA, and Lyon University, laboratory of Polymer Materials Engineering (IMP), France. The bulk of his thesis work was focused on the design of new biomaterial approaches for applications that interact with humans or the environment, this includes drug delivery scaffolds and stimuli-responsive gels. Having been awarded his Ph.D. degree in September 2018, he joined the Per-Olof’s group as a postdoctoral associate in October 2018. His current work focuses on the development new biomaterials within the School of Engineering Sciences in Chemistry, Biotechnology and Health at KTH.
Tamás Görbe
PhD, Postdoctoral researcher
Wallenberg Wood Science Center
SciLifeLab and KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden
tamas.gorbe@scilifelab.se
Hey, I am Tamas, and originally come from Hungary. I did my undergraduate studies at the University of Szeged, where I worked on synthetic drug development. After my graduation, I have joined the research group of Jan-E. Backvall at Stockholm University, where I did my Ph.D. studies on the field of biocatalysis and protein engineering. My work was focused on the development of chemoenzymatic kinetic resolution and dynamic kinetic resolution of alcohols and amines. During my Ph.D. time, I got the opportunity to do an internship at the Frances H. Arnold’s lab at Caltech, where I was able to learn and apply the directed evolution technique on the oxidoreductase family. After my graduation, I have joined the Per-Olof’s group as a postdoc, where I am working on systems biocatalysis and bioinformatics within the Wallenberg Wood Science Center.
Patricia Saenz-Mendez
PhD, Senior Researcher
SciLifeLab and KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden
patricia.saenz-mendez@scilifelab.se
Hola! My name is Patricia and I come from Uruguay. I graduated in my home Country (Universidad de la República) as a Pharmaceutical Chemist (Professional Degree), and then I earned my Master degree in Organic Synthesis and Medicinal Chemistry. Afterwards, My PhD program combined both Organic Chemistry and Computational Chemistry, mixing organic synthesis, biotransformations and quantum chemistry to study the oligomerization of cyclitols. Then, I moved to Sweden (Örebro University) for one year as a Postdoc, to work in Computational (Bio)Chemistry, in the drug design field and also in the computational study of lignin in the context of biorefineries. I was appointed then as an Associate Professor of Computational Chemistry in Uruguay, but I moved again to Sweden as a Marie Curie Fellow to work at the University of Gothenburg in the computational design of novel antibiotics against resistant bacteria. And now, from October 2018 I started a researcher position in Per-Olof´s group, focusing mainly in the computational design of enzymes for the recycling of textile fibers.
PhD-students
Natalie Hendrikse
PhD student
KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden
Swedish Orphan Biovitrum AB, Stockholm, Sweden
natalie.hendrikse@sobi.com
My name is Natalie, I come from The Netherlands and I finished my master’s in Medical Engineering at KTH here in Stockholm in June 2016. I am now an industrial PhD student working at the KTH School of Chemical Science and Engineering as well as Sobi, a Swedish biopharmaceutical company specialized in orphan diseases. Both are situated at SciLifeLab in Solna. My project is about designing and engineering enzymes for therapeutic applications, such as treatment of certain rare genetic diseases. Recently, I started working with bioinformatics and especially phylogenetics and ancestral sequence reconstruction of enzymes.
Karen Schriever
PhD student
SciLifeLab and KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden
karen.schriever@scilifelab.se
Hej! My name is Karen – I come from Germany and finished my Master of Biochemistry at the University of Heidelberg in summer 2018. During my Master degree, I have worked with different types of proteins and protein engineering methods. I started my PhD in the Protein Engineering of Enzymes group in October 2018. In my project I will focus on enzyme engineering and biocatalytic pathways at the interface to metabolic engineering.
Arne Stamm
PhD student
KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden.
arne.stamm@scilifelab.se
Hej! My name is Arne, I am from Germany and I did my master’s in Nanoscience at the University of Hamburg. I started my PhD in March 2017 at the School of Chemical Science and Engineering at KTH in Stockholm. I am working on the polymerization of biopolymers using molecular building blocks from renewable sources, mainly focussing on monomers containing cycling subunits.
Diploma students
Sara Ericsson
Master student
Uppsala University and SciLifeLab
sara.ericsson@scilifelab.se
Johan Granath
Bachelor student
KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden.
jograna@kth.se
Laiqing Xu
Master student
KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden.
Laiqing.xu@scilifelab.se
Hi! My name is Laiqing Xu, I come from China. I am in the industrial and environmental biotechnology master program at KTH. From March 2019 I started my master’s degree project in the lab. The project is about screening terpene cyclase variants.
Former group members
Oscar Skirfors
KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden.
Project worker, microbiology and protein engineering (2018).
Hailey Sounart
SciLifeLab
Project worker, synthetic biology (2018).
Maxime Robert-Monpate
ESCOM – Superior School of Organic and Mineral Chemistry in Compiègne, France.
Project worker, synthetic chemistry and biology (2018).
Maryam Mousa
Stockholm University, Sweden.
Project on monomeric building blocks from renewable sources for further polymerization (2018).
Charlotte Kürten
KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden.
PhD-thesis on fundamental terpene biochemistries.
Gwenaëlle Charpentier
ESCOM – Superior School of Organic and Mineral Chemistry in Compiègne, France.
Project on ancestral terpene cyclases (2017).
Adam Eriksson
KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden.
Project on fundamental terpene biochemistries (2017).
Lauren Lyne
Karolinska Institute, Solna, Sweden.
Project on characterization of ancestral terpene cyclases (2017).
Martin Toul
Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic.
ERASMUS student. Project on biocatalysis and mechanisms of enzyme catalysis (2016).
