Joakim Lundeberg

Lundeberg pioneered spatial transcriptomics. The method his group published in Science in 2016 used spatially barcoded arrays to read a whole transcriptome while keeping every measurement tied to its position in the tissue section, rather than dissolving that structure the moment a sample is prepared. It was commercialised by 10x Genomics as Visium and became the global standard for the field.

The group's work since has pushed in several directions at once: subcellular spatial assays, multimodal integration of mass spectrometry with transcriptomics, and computational methods that infer gene expression directly from routine H&E morphology, combined with super-resolution fusion. The throughline is building large-scale molecular atlases and the measurement technology that makes them practical.

He defended his PhD in biotechnology at KTH in 1993, did a postdoc at Radiumhospitalet in Oslo, and returned to KTH as a group leader, becoming professor of molecular biotechnology in 2000. His group has been based at SciLifeLab since 2010, where he is a co-founder, scientific co-director of the spatial biology platform, and former director of the National Genomics Infrastructure.

He holds an ERC Advanced Grant and is a Wallenberg Scholar, Distinguished Professor and Swedish Research Council grantee, with more than 340 publications, over 40 doctoral students supervised and several biotech companies co-founded.