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Biography
Pernilla Wittung-Stafshede (maiden name Wittung) is a Swedish biophysical chemist, born in 1968, who is a professor of chemical biology at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg. 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.
After her Ph.D., she worked for twelve years in the United States at the California Institute of Technology, Beckman Institute in Pasadena, California (1997-98), Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana (1999-2003) and Rice University in Houston, Texas (2004-2008).
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.