Professor Lene Oddershede is Chief Scientific Officer of Planetary Science & Technology at the Novo Nordisk Foundation with the ambition to progress fundamental knowledge within the natural and technical sciences and biotechnology. Until 2025, she served as Senior Vice President where she was responsible for grant awarding activities within Natural and Technical Sciences, with a particular emphasis on interdisciplinarity.
Professor Oddershede earned her PhD in physics in 1998. In 2003, she became a tenured associate professor and group leader at the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, and in 2015, she was appointed full professor at the same institution. She established Scandinavia’s first optical tweezers facility and has led several major interdisciplinary research projects and centres, including a University of Copenhagen Star Programme, Synergy Programmes, and a Danish National Research Foundation Center of Excellence.
Her research has focused on the physical properties of biological systems, light-matter interactions, and nanophotonics, and she has developed a novel cancer therapy. Professor Oddershede has received numerous awards, including the Danish Optical Society Prize for Young Investigators, the Silver Medal of the Danish Royal Academy of Sciences and Letters (of which she is a member), and the Elite Research Prize from the Danish Research Councils.
