Emma Lundberg

Emma Lundberg is a Swedish cell biologist who is a professor at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology and Director of Cell Profiling at the Science for Life Laboratory. Her research focuses on spatial proteomics and cell biology, using antibody-based approaches to study fundamental aspects of human biology and the impact of protein variation on disease.

She is currently an Associate Professor of Bioengineering and Pathology at Stanford University, and serves as Co-Founder and Chief Scientific Advisor at GenBio AI, an AI company developing multiscale AI foundation models for biology.

Early life and education Lundberg was an undergraduate and postgraduate student at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology. Her doctoral research introduced bio imaging as a means to understand expression in cells.

Research and career Lundberg combines computational investigations with experimental analysis to identify the spatiotemporal expression of proteins at the level of single cells. Eukaryotic cells can support multiple processes in parallel due to the compartmentalisation of biological processes. Each specific compartment describes a particular cellular function and the molecular controllers required to complete a specific function. When defects occur within the compartments, they can give rise to various forms of human disease.

Lundberg seeks to facilitate access to science and science communication. She created the human protein atlas the Cell Atlas, which looks to identify the sub-cellular localization of all human proteins. She was involved with the launch of “Project Discovery”, a citizen science project that uses members of the public to classify protein patterns. She integrated this project with Eve Online, a gaming platform.

Lundberg spent over two years at the Stanford School of Medicine. She has since made use of artificial intelligence to better understand microscopy images. The models created by Lundberg assist with image acquisition, processing and analysis. They can be used to segment data, enabling statistical analysis. Preliminary work indicated that human cells were considerably more complex than previously thought, including proteins that form into unfamiliar structures.

Awards and honours 2016 Wallenberg Academy Fellow 2021 Royal Microscopical Society Scientific Achievement Award

Selected publications