Professor Anders Hamsten is Vice-Chancellor (President) of Karolinska Institutet since 2013. He is a member of the Nobel Assembly, which awards the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, and has served on the Nobel Committee during 2010-2012.
Professor Hamsten earned his medical and doctoral degrees at Karolinska Institutet. In 1999, he was appointed Professor of Cardiovascular Diseases, and he is since 1999 Senior Consultant Cardiologist at the Karolinska University Hospital. He has served as Chairman of Medicine for 7 years, as Director of the King Gustaf V Research Institute for 14 years and as Head of the Atherosclerosis Research Unit at the Department of Medicine for 20 years. He has authored more than 400 original articles, and his work has been cited >27,000 times (h-index: 90).
Professor Hamsten’s research focus is in atherothrombosis, with the mission to unravel the aetiology and pathophysiological mechanisms underlying atherosclerosis, arterial thrombosis and aneurysm formation. He is a principal investigator of the European PROCARDIS programme on the search for new susceptibility genes underlying coronary heart disease, initiated with support from the European Commission in 1998.
Professor Hamsten has served as member of the international evaluation panel of the Biocenter Oulu, University of Oulu, Finland and of the scientific boards of the Ragnar Söderberg Foundation and the Swedish Heart-Lung Foundation. He has also been serving as member of site visiting teams evaluating British Heart Foundation chairs and was elected Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians London (for scientific excellence) in 2002. He received a Distinguished Professor Award from Karolinska Institutet in 2011.