Failing small blood vessels are an early and shared feature of high blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease and dementia. Yet they are hard to see. As associate professor, I lead the Blood Flow Imaging group, which studies how these vessels work in health and disease and builds light-based instruments to measure them in animals and patients. I hold doctorates in physics and medical sciences, trained at Copenhagen and Boston Universities, and am Associate Editor of Neurophotonics.
The smallest blood vessels never stand still. A pulse runs through them with every heartbeat, and they widen and narrow in slow rhythms of their own. I study how age, sex and diseases such as diabetes and high blood pressure change this motion. My group has shown, for example, that common anaesthetics double the pulse in the small brain vessels of mice, which may change how animal studies are read. With the light-based imaging I develop, I aim to detect these changes early in patients.
I teach imaging of blood flow and oxygenation in the Integrative Neuroimaging summer school at Aarhus University, and from 2018 to 2024 I co-organised the PhD course Advanced In-vivo Optical Imaging Techniques. Combining lectures with hands-on exercises, I want biologists and doctors to understand the physics behind their instruments, and engineers the physiology they measure. I have also developed exercises, programming tasks and student research projects for courses in Aarhus and Copenhagen.
I work with clinical partners at Gødstrup Hospital and in Copenhagen, where a skin imaging system I designed measures the health of small blood vessels in large studies. With eye doctors at Aarhus University Hospital, I measure blood flow in the retina, and with physiologists at the Department of Biomedicine, in the brain. I develop methods with partners such as Boston University, and with companies such as Moor Instruments I work towards instruments that hospitals and laboratories can use.
I serve on the Institutional Review Board of Aarhus University. There I review research protocols for studies involving human participants and contribute to guidance for researchers and students. I am also Associate Editor of Neurophotonics, a journal of SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics, and I review manuscripts for journals such as Optica and Biomedical Optics Express.
My main responsibility is the research of the Blood Flow Imaging group. I raise its funding, run its imaging laboratory and supervise its students and postdocs. I lead projects funded by the Lundbeck Foundation, the Independent Research Fund Denmark and the Novo Nordisk Foundation. I also teach in the Integrative Neuroimaging summer school, work with the Technology Transfer Office to patent and certify our instruments, and serve on the university's Institutional Review Board.
