Mathias Luidor Heltberg receives Carlsberg Foundation Reintegration Fellowship

Mathias Luidor Heltberg has been awarded a three-year Carlsberg Reintegration Fellowship. Mathias was a student in the Biocomplexity Group of the Niels Bohr Institute, from where he received his PhD-degree in March 2019. He was awarded a PhD Prize from the Faculty of Science for his thesis work. During this period he collaborated with a number of international research groups, and most notably he engaged in a strong collaboration with the the experimental group of Galit Lahav Department of Systems Biology at Harvard, where he also spent six months as a visiting researcher. Following this, he went to Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, where he worked in the theoretical statistical physics department.

Mathias now returns to Denmark supported by a Reintegration Fellowship from the Carlsberg Foundation. His project is entitled “Repair and

regulation in DNA damage response” and it investigates a new hypothesis on how living organisms can create reliable responses to DNA damage. The two most fundamental mechanisms here is the repair of damage and the following regulation of cell state that guarantees that the cell does not divide while damage is still present. Mathias has specialized in the repair mechanism during his stay in Paris, and worked on the regulation mechanisms while being at Harvard. It is now his aim to connect these important branches of DNA repair, and Mathias aims to createa strong foundation in Copenhagen that eventually will give him the possibility to lead his own research group on this and related fundamental topics in biophysics.