Pernilla Wittung-Stafshede


Pernilla Wittung-Stafshede is a Swedish biophysical chemist, born in 1968, who is a professor of chemical biology at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg.

Education

She received her Master of Science Degree in Engineering from Chalmers University of Technology and a doctorate at the same institution in 1996 in biophysical chemistry under Bengt Nordén, with a thesis entitled Intelligent nucleic acid interactions with peptide nucleic acids and in recombination proteins.

Employment

After her Ph.D., she worked for twelve years in the United States at the California Institute of Technology, Beckman Institute in Pasadena, California, Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana and Rice University in Houston, Texas.
In 2008, she returned to Sweden to a professor position at Umeå University. Since September 2015, she has been a professor at Chalmers University of Technology and is the head of the Chemical Biology division. She leads a research group that focuses on the biophysical properties of proteins; both metal-transporting proteins and proteins that fold incorrectly and clump together. The research is basic science, but has links to diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and cancer.
In 2010, Pernilla Wittung-Stafshede was one of ten researchers in Sweden who was appointed as a Wallenberg Scholar, with a five-year grant awarded by the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation.
In 2017 she was elected a member of the council of Biophysical Society. It was the second time ever for a Swedish scientist; the first one was Arne Engström 1960–1963.

Awards and honors

Pernilla Wittung-Stafshede has received a number of awards and prizes. These include:
Pernilla Wittung-Stafshede has published more than 200 scientific articles in peer-reviewed journals.

Debate articles

Is the Gender Gap Solved in Liberal Sweden? Debate article, published on STEM Women website.
Academia in Sweden is not as equal as you think. Debate article in Swedish in the Swedish Research Council’s web magazine Curie.

Other

In 2016, she was a guest blogger for the Research Council's web magazine Curie.