University of Oslo

Norwaywww.uio.no/english

About

The University of Oslo is Norway’s largest public institution of research and higher education with approximately 27,200 students and 6,500 employees. It is also Norway’s oldest and highest ranked university, with 50% of the Norwegian ERC grants and more than 40% of the Norwegian Centres of Excellence. The Faculty of Medicine’s teaching and research extends over a large area, from basic biomedical research to clinical studies and public health. The Faculty is highly active in dissemination and innovation activities. The research environment at the Department of Nutrition, at the Medical Faculty was recently evaluated by the Research Council of Norway as being very good to excellent, thus being among the top 10% highest research environments evaluated in Norway.

Role in LongITools

The University of Oslo will lead on RNA expression analysis in work packages 4,5 and 6 and participate in research activities in the field of cardiometabolic diseases, nutrition and toxicology.

Cohorts included: NOMA, a randomized controlled dietary intervention study.

Professor Stine Marie Ulven

Principal Investigator (PI)

Stine is Professor of Nutrition and group leader of “personalized nutrition and prevention of cardiometabolic diseases”. The group uses randomized controlled dietary intervention studies and applies large scale datasets to investigate molecular mechanisms of diet, and in particular fat quality on cardiometabolic risk markers, to better understand why some respond better to intervention than others. Stine is head of the department of nutrition and a member of the Norwegian scientific committee for food and environment. Her role in the project is to lead the RNA expression analysis.

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Professor Kirsten B Holven

Research Team

Kirsten is a Professor in Clinical Nutrition and group leader of “diet, cholesterol, inflammation and atherosclerosis”. The group wants to understand the impact of cholesterol exposure on early atherosclerosis and offspring health and investigate the effect of cholesterol modulation through medical and dietary means using state-of-the-art methodologies. Kirsten is also head of section of clinical nutrition, leader of the education committee in clinical nutrition and head of research at the National Advisory Unit on Familial Hypercholesterolemia at Oslo University Hospital.

Professor Jason Matthews

Research Team

Jason is Professor in Molecular Nutrition and group leader of “molecular toxicology” which studies the role of how environmental contaminants in food effect health and disease. Jason is specifically interested in chronic inflammatory diseases, fatty liver disease and metabolic syndrome. He co-leads a collaborative project funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health research to investigate the role of dioxins on fatty liver disease and lipid homeostasis. Jason is the leader of the toxicology section of the Norwegian Society of Pharmacology and Toxicology.

Amanda Rundblad

Research Team

Amanda has an MSc in biotechnology and a PhD in nutrition. She has experience in analysis of transcriptomics and metabolomics in randomized controlled trials and cross-sectional nutrition studies with a focus on the effect of fat intake on cardiometabolic risk markers. She utilises RStudio and the tidyverse to tidy, transform, model and visualise large-scale datasets generated from NMR spectroscopy, RNA sequencing, microarrays and NanoString analyses.

Hege Berg Henriksen

Research Team

Hege has an MSc in biology and a PhD in clinical nutrition. She is specifically interested in investigating the effect of diet and other lifestyle factors on biomarkers of health outcomes. Changes in body composition, such as fat mass and lean mass, due to disease and lifestyle related factors is also of interest. She has experience in developing, validating and using digital assessment tools estimating diet and lifestyle factors as well as body composition. Her role in the project is to participate in defining user and clinical requirements of the innovative exposome-based healthcare application in WP7.

Siddhartha Das

Research Team

Siddhartha has a masters in human genetics and bioinformatics and subsequently worked as a bioinformatics analyst for 2.5 years. He has experience working on the analysis of RNA and ChIP sequencing data generated from mouse models or in vitro studies to investigate role of COMPASS complex proteins in human development and disease. His role in the project is to identify how different environmental exposure factors, in particular the effect of diet, influence cardiovascular disease outcomes using longitudinal data by combination of statistical and machine learning approaches. He primarily uses R and RStudio for his analysis.