PhD Award to Chemistry’s Jacob Kæstel-Hansen
Congratulations to Jacob, who is receiving the SCIENCE PhD Award for his dissertation “Accelerating Biological Discoveries by Decoding Single-Particle Spatio-temporal Dynamics Using Machine Learning”, supervised by Professor Nikos Hatzakis
Jacob is being honored for his visionary research, technical innovation, and outstanding scientific quality – his work has accelerated biological discoveries and gained recognition both in academia and industry.
During his PhD, Jacob produced over 11 publications, developed DeepSPT, an AI model that extracts biological insights from particle movements and SEMORE, a tool for analyzing super-resolution data with minimal user input as well. Jacob also demonstrated strong leadership by mentoring several students and machine learning projects.
Behind every PhD lies an incredible number of hours of hard work, and knowing that the quality of research at Chemistry and UCPH’s other faculties is world-class, it’s a huge honor to be one of four winners of the SCIENCE PhD Award,”
The best part of the PhD work wasn’t just one thing, but two, Jacob continues:
“The fact that we in Nikos Hatzakis’ lab are able to track individual biomolecules as they move inside living cells, and thus can observe and analyze biology at the nanoscale as it happens, still feels like science fiction to me and has been incredibly rewarding to contribute to.
On top of that, the collaboration, the social and collegial atmosphere at Chemistry at KU and Harvard Medical School has been absolutely fantastic, filled with many exciting and truly great colleagues, which has played a huge role in the success and quality of the work.”