ERA Chair holder
Prof. Carsten Carlberg is a world-class biochemist in the area of research on vitamin D. He is the leader of ERA Chair international research group that will lay basis for creation of an interdisciplinary Centre of Excellence exploiting the tools of nutrigenomics to assess the impact of nutrition on the genetic predisposition to diet-related diseases.
Prof. Carlberg’s research has been focused on vitamin D for over 30 years. He studied the effects of vitamin D on changes of the epigenome (which are modifications to genomic DNA and histones that do not affect the genetic code) and the transcriptome (set of mRNA molecules present at a specific time in a cell, in order to encode for specific and appropriate amounts of proteins). On this molecular basis he came up with the concept to distinguish human populations into high, mid and low responders to vitamin D suggesting personalized vitamin D supplementation. This has a high impact for bones health as well as the proper functioning of the immune system with implications on infections, autoimmunity, cancer and metabolic diseases. Prof. Carlberg’s current research projects focus on the effects of vitamin D on the whole human genome (all genetic information) under in vivo conditions.
Prof. Carlberg has authored 168 original research publications, 68 peer-reviewed review articles and 45 other publications, including 7 textbooks. One of the latter is on Nutrigenomics, a topic on which he has been lecturing on since 2003. This was one the first lecture courses on nutrigenomics worldwide. All this has translated into over 17,000 citations and ranked him in the group of 0.2% most influential researchers. Prof. Carlberg is also a dedicated, highly reputed mentor and scientific supervisor of over 60 postdoctoral fellows, PhD and MSc students.
