Professor Jørgen Kjems has been appointed director of the Interdisciplinary Nanoscience Centre (iNANO) for a three-year period. He has been an integrated part of the management at the centre for a number of years, both as a founding member of iNANO and as acting director since 2014.

Professor Kjems studied at Aarhus University, where he completed his PhD in Biostructural Chemistry in 1989 at the Department of Chemistry. He subsequently spent three years as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, USA, prior to returning to Aarhus. He was appointed associate professor at the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics in 1994 and professor in 2003.

With a main field of research in nanomedicine, Professor Kjems has over the years contributed with world-class research in this area, and he has built up a large international network. He has published approximately 250 scientific articles and has 10,000 citations. His latest major discovery, which was published in Nature in 2013, is the presence of a new type of circular RNA molecules in human cells that can be used as both disease markers and nanomedicine.

Professor Kjems is also principal investigator (PI) of the LUNA Centre (the Lundbeck Foundation Nanomedicine Centre for Individualized Management of Tissue Damage and Regeneration), and he participates in a number of other centres – the Centre for DNA Nanotechnology (CDNA), the Biomolecular Nanoscale Engineering Centre (BioNEC) and Aarhus University’s Centre for Integrative Sequencing (iSEQ).

Over the years, Professor Kjems has received a number of awards, and he is a member of several academic councils.

He was born in 1958 and is married to Lena, a minister of religion in Vejlby. They have three children and live in the Aarhus suburb of Risskov.

For more information, please contact

Professor Jørgen Kjems
Director of iNANO
Aarhus University
Mobile +45 2899 2086
kjems@inano.au.dk

Article by Anne- Mette Siem