Pär Engström

Pär leads the NBIS Health and Clinical Support team together with Bengt Sennblad. The team provides advanced bioinformatics support and training to Swedish life science, focusing on studies with medical and health-related questions. We mainly work with human data, including genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics and clinical information. Our work includes consultation and hands-on support in study design, data processing, genetic associations, biomarker identification, cancer genomics, multi-omics integration and machine learning. We are engaged in the SciLifeLab & Wallenberg National Program for Data-Driven Life Science (DDLS), by providing bioinformatics support within the DDLS Precision Medicine and Diagnostics research area.

Previous experience

Pär worked as a software developer in the telecommunications and internet industry in the early 90s, and then moved on to study biomedicine at Uppsala University, obtained a PhD in genomics and bioinformatics from Karolinska Institutet (2007), followed by postdoctoral studies at the European Bioinformatics Institute. His past research includes studies of gene structure and organization in mammalian genomes using diverse types of RNA sequencing data, with a particular focus on discovery and functional characterization of non-protein coding RNAs; comparisons of animal genomes to identify regulatory elements and examine their evolutionary relationship to chromosomal rearrangements; and studies of transcriptional and genetic alterations in cancer using microarray and sequencing-based approaches. Pär joined SciLifeLab in 2013, as a member of the WABI bioinformatics support team, where he worked on characterization of genetic variants underlying human disease, as well as genome annotation based on RNA-seq and proteomics. He has been a manager at NBIS since mid-2016.