Professor Lene Oddershede is Senior Vice President at the Novo Nordisk Foundation with responsibility for the foundation’s grant awarding activities within the Natural and Technical Science Research with a focus on Interdisciplinarity. The Novo Nordisk Foundation aims to improve people’s life through better health, education and the development of a knowledge based sustainable society. Lene Oddershede received her PhD degree in physics 1998, in 2003 she became tenured associate professor and group leader at the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, and in 2015 she was called to a full professorship at the Niels Bohr Institute. She established the first optical tweezers facility in Scandinavia and has been the leader of several interdisciplinary large-scale research projects and centers. For instance, she headed a University of Copenhagen Star Programme, has lead Synergy Programmes, and was Center Leader of a Danish National Research Foundation Center of Excellence. Her research has focused on exploring the physical properties of biological systems, on light-matter interactions and nano-photonics, and she developed a novel cancer therapy. Lene Oddershede has received several research prizes, e.g., the Danish Optical Society prize for young investigators, the Silver Medal of the Danish Royal Academy of Sciences and Letters, of which she is also a member, and the Elite Research Prize from the Danish Research Councils. She was recruited to the Novo Nordisk Foundation from 1 January 2019 where she established the expansion of the foundation’s grant awarding area into the fields of natural and technical sciences with a focus on interdisciplinarity.
