I am a molecular and computational biologist working on vascular disease. I hold a medical degree (MD) in medical biochemistry from Siberian State Medical University in Tomsk, Russia, and completed my PhD at Aarhus University in 2025. My thesis studied smooth muscle cell–derived subtypes in atherosclerotic plaques, comparing them across species and following them through disease regression.
I am now a postdoctoral researcher in the DREAM lab at the Department of Biomedicine, as part of a Novo Nordisk Foundation Challenge project. I am also Vice President of the NGSchool Society, which organizes NGSchool, a bioinformatics summer school in Poland.
I study how vascular smooth muscle cells change identity in atherosclerosis and how these transitions shape plaque composition and stability. During my PhD, I used single-cell RNA sequencing to compare smooth muscle cell–derived and other mesenchymal cells across mouse, pig and human plaques. I showed that the three species share core populations but also differ, which matters when findings from animal models are translated to patients. I also co-authored work showing that fibroblast-like cells accumulate late in human coronary atherosclerosis and help form the necrotic core.
As a postdoc, I am building a multi-modal atlas of human atherosclerotic plaques that combines single-cell transcriptomics, spatial transcriptomics and spatial lipidomics by MALDI mass spectrometry imaging. The aim is to connect cell states to where they sit in the plaque and to the lipid environment around them. Longer term, I am interested in what constrains smooth muscle cell plasticity, and whether the same rules hold across vascular diseases.
I teach single-cell RNA sequencing data analysis in a PhD course at Aarhus University, giving lectures and running hands-on workshops at basic and advanced levels. I also teach single-cell analysis at NGSchool and co-organize its scientific program.
My work centers on the computational side of our human atherosclerosis atlas. That means processing and analyzing single-cell, spatial transcriptomic and spatial lipidomic data, aligning the modalities across adjacent tissue sections, and integrating them into a joint picture of plaque cell states. Alongside the computational work, I use microscopy and in vitro and in vivo models. My core expertise is single-cell transcriptomics, cross-species comparison of cell states and smooth muscle cell biology, with a foundation in medical biochemistry.