Professor of Neuroinflammation
Department of Clinical Neuroscience
Center for Molecular Medicine
Karolinska Institutet
Stockholm, Sweden
Website: https://ki.se/en/people/majjag
Maja Jagodic completed her MSc degree at the University of Belgrade, Serbia in Molecular Biology and Physiology specializing in Experimental Medicine in 1999. She then moved to Sweden, where she obtained her PhD degree at the Karolinska Institutet studying genetic predisposition to autoimmune diseases in model organisms in 2004. After thesis defence, she spent a year at the Karolinska Institutet gaining skills in human genetics. Already towards the end of her PhD thesis, Maja became fascinated by the field of epigenetics. Epigenetic mechanisms that orchestrate genome activity in response to environmental cues were at that time strongly implicated in the aetiology of complex inflammatory diseases but virtually unexplored. Maja was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship to study epigenetic mechanisms in cancer at the University of Cambridge, UK. In 2008, she was awarded an Assistant Professor position by the Swedish Research Council, and she returned to Sweden to initiate studies of epigenetic mechanisms in Multiple Sclerosis. She was appointed a group leader position at the Department of Clinical Neuroscience at the Karolinska Institutet in 2012, and she became an Associate Professor in Experimental Medicine in 2014. Her research group continues to utilize functional genetic approaches to study mechanisms underlying chronic inflammation in the brain with a focus on Multiple Sclerosis and its experimental models.
