Cell Stress & Inflammation

Chronic inflammation is a defining feature of many non-communicable diseases, including metabolic disorders and cancer. Understanding how inflammation arises - and how it can be controlled - is a central challenge in understanding and treating these conditions.
 
In the Cell Stress & Inflammation Lab, we ask a fundamental question: how do cells respond to and convert stress into inflammatory signals? Cells are constantly exposed to environmental challenges, metabolic imbalance, and disrupted signalling. These inputs must be interpreted and acted upon. When adaptive responses fail, sustained stress signals can be converted into inflammatory cues, and, when unresolved, can ultimately lead to cell death. This shifts the response from protective adaptation to an inflammatory driver of disease.
 
We study how stress signals are sensed, integrated, and transmitted through interconnected post-translational signalling networks, particularly ubiquitination, and how their dysregulation promotes disease. More broadly, we dissect the signalling processes that govern cellular decision-making at the interface of cell stress, metabolism, and cell death, and how these signalling events shape inflammatory outcomes.
 
To do this, we combine molecular cell biology, biochemistry, quantitative mass spectrometry-based proteomics, and functional cell biology assays to dissect signalling pathways and stress adaptation responses. This integrated approach allows us to move from molecular mechanisms to a system-level understanding.
 
Our goal is to identify critical control points in stress-induced signalling that can be targeted therapeutically to enable new therapeutic strategies for non-communicable, inflammation-driven diseases, including metabolic disorders and cancer.

Team and collaborations

If you join our group, you will become part of an international and ambitious team of researchers at all career levels. We collaborate widely - within DTU, across Denmark, and with international experts in cell biology, structural biology, biochemistry, omics technologies, bioinformatics, and animal models. We are part of multiple research communities spanning cell signalling, stress biology, and metabolism, and we actively participate in international conferences and collaborative research projects.