Karsten Kristiansen is Professor of Molecular Biology and heads the Laboratory of Genomics and Molecular Biomedicine at the Department of Biology, University of Copenhagen. He is also Professor and Director at BGI-Shenzhen and the Institute of Metagenomics, Qingdao-Europe Institute for Advanced Life Sciences, Qingdao, China.

After graduation from the University of Copenhagen, he held research positions at the Max-Planck-Institut für Molekulare Genetik in Berlin and at the Institut de Biologie Physico-Chimique, Fondation Edmond de Rothschild, in Paris. He was full professor and Head of Department of Molecular Biology, later Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, University of Southern Denmark, 1992-2008, before he was recruited as professor and Head of the Department of Biology, University of Copenhagen in 2008. He stepped down from being Head of Department in 2015 in order to spend more time with BGI-Shenzhen.

Central themes of the research of Professor Kristiansen concern the interaction between the host genome, the host immune system and the gut microbiota in regulating gut health and energy metabolism, and how interaction between different nutrients modulates energy homeostasis. In addition, his research groups now explore the interaction between the brain and the gut microbiota. For these projects, his research groups use a combination of molecular biology approaches, animal studies, metagenomics and genomics. He has published more than 400 articles in refereed journals, many of which in high ranking journals such as Science, Nature, and Cell, and he is a WoS Clarivate highly cited researcher.

In PREDICT, Karsten Kristiansen will provide in depth analysis of the composition and functional potential of the gut microbiota and detail how interaction between the gut microbiota, host genome and host immune system will affect/modulate development and progression of IBD. For this, Karsten Kristiansen will use state-of-the-art metagenomics and bioinformatics tools including machine learning and AI.