Haakon Egdetveit Nustad
I am excited to start working with the PharmaTox project!
My academic background is in physics and mathematics, with specialization in statistics. In the spring of 2016 I submitted my master thesis at the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. For the following six weeks, I continued working with the master project as an employee at NTNU.
In the thesis, I worked with establishing a model for finding differently methylated positions between groups of people when analyzing methylation data (450k). The aim was to incorporate the correlation structure along the chromosomes for subsequent CpGs, and see if such a model could perform better than a regular t-test. The statistical tool used for fitting the model was an R library developed at NTNU called Integrated Nested Laplace Approximations (INLA), which is a regression tool for doing Bayesian inference. With the Stochastic Partial Differential Equation (SPDE) extension, spatially dependent effects can be included in the model. To further investigate this and other methods for analyzing methylation data pulled me towards the PharmaTox project.
Mari Spildrejorde
I have a background in molecular biology and graduated from the University of Oslo in 2010. In 2013, I completed my MSc at the University of Wollongong, Australia. My masters thesis included an immunological, genetic and pharmacological characterisation of the purinergic P2X7 receptor in dogs, which is involved in innate immune responses and inflammatory disorders.
Following the completion of my masters, I have been working as an engineer in diagnostics and research in the Department of Medical Genetics at Oslo University Hospital. The main objective was to find the genetic cause of a patient´s disease using different molecular techniques and the interpretation of genetic variants.
I am very excited to join the PharmaTox group, and will be working with epigenetic outcomes of drug exposure on differentiated stem cells.