About group leader and principal investigator Johanna Olweus:

“I feel very fortunate that science is my hobby in addition to being my job. I really think I have the best job there is, and I hope to inspire others to join the fascinating field of cancer immunology. My professional background started with graduation from medical school in Bergen, Norway in 1992. I then went further west to work for almost five years as a scientist at Becton Dickinson in San Jose, California, funded by a PhD grant from the Norwegian Research Council. By use of flow cytometers with ultra high sensitivity, I conducted the first high resolution studies on cytokine receptors on human hematopoietic progenitor cells. This work was performed in collaboration with my husband Fridtjof Lund-Johansen. I defended my PhD at the University of Bergen in 1998. I thereafter had a break in my scientific activities while completing medical internship and taking maternity leaves with three boys. However, in parallel with a residency as an MD in immunology and transfusion medicine (specialist in 2006), I built up a research group around studies of antigen presenting cells, and subsequently cancer immunotherapy. During my residency at the Institute for Immunology at Oslo University Hospital Rikshospitalet, I learned about HLA-typing and workups in allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation, and that T cells from healthy donors can be very powerful at eradicating cancer cells in patients. This lead to my interest in using various modalities of donor-derived immunity in cancer immunotherapy (see Research interests). By the end of 2007 I joined the Department of Cancer Immunology at the Institute for Cancer Research, Oslo University Hospital Radiumhospitalet, as a Scientist. By end of 2008, I was appointed Head of Department, and Professor at the University of Oslo. Our group was also a partnering group of the K.G.Jebsen Center for Inflammation Research, and of Oslo University Hospital Focus area Cancer Immunotherapy. I was recently awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant (September 2020-2025) to pursue the goal of utilizing the mechanism of transplant rejection to identify self-reactive, therapeutic TCRs from healthy donors with the project “OUTSOURCE”. In Dec 2021 our group published proof-of-concept for this approach in Nature Biotechnology.