9 January 2023

Benjamin Anderschou Holbech Jensen becomes associate professor

New associate professor

As of 1 February, Benjamin Anderschou Holbech Jensen is appointed associate professor at Department of Biomedical Sciences. Benjamin has been assistant professor since June 2021, where he established his research group after receiving an NNF Excellence Emerging Investigator grant.

Benjamin Anderschou Holbech Jensen

Benjamin is to be employed in a permanent position on the basis of the Department's open posting. Benjamin will henceforth be part of the research theme Endocrinology and Metabolism and will have his daily routine on 12.2. Head of Department Cathrine Ørskov says: "I am happy to welcome Benjamin as associate professor at the Department. His translational approach is a great match with the research made at the Department."

Benjamin's research focuses on lifestyle-induced changes to the intestinal barrier and the immune system as a whole, and on investigating how factors in the diet, the gut microbial structures and the immune system in different parts of the body collaborate to orchestrate host responses both inside and outside the gastrointestinal tract. Benjamin has a particular interest in so-called 'protective peptides' (formerly known as antimicrobial peptides) and their influence on the mutual interaction between the host and the microbiome in the development, prevention and treatment of chronic inflammation. Benjamin and his group have developed experimental systems tailored to mimic human disease with unmet medical needs, primarily to improve our molecular understanding of disease progression, but also to identify hierarchical factors with therapeutic potential.

Before Benjamin became an assistant professor at the Department, he was an international postdoc at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Basic Metabolic Research and Laval University, QC, Canada. On the basis of an NNF Excellence Emerging Investigator grant in endocrinology and metabolism for his project "Host-Microbe Mutualism in Diet-induced Liver Disease: When Friends Become Foes", Benjamin established his own research group at the Department.

About his appointment as associate professor, Benjamin says: "It is with great honor and gratitude that I now take up the position of associate professor at the Department of Biomedical Sciences. It has been a big dream to return to the Danish research environment at a department that pays such tribute to diversity, teaching and interdisciplinary research. Research freedom has been a catalyst for the group's rapid development over recent years. The research and teaching collaboration that exists in this unique environment means that we can very quickly take basic scientific discoveries from the laboratory and transfer them to the clinic and/or industry, as well as stimulate the next generations of promising researchers and practitioners, with which our knowledge and experience can come out and benefit society as a whole with enormous speed in a global sense."