Johan Trygg's Biography

Johan Trygg, Professor, Umea University

Johan received his Ph.D. in 2001, at the research group for Chemometrics at Umeå University, Sweden with Professor Svante Wold as supervisor. He was thereafter awarded the prestigious Knut & Alice Wallenberg scholarship, and spent two years abroad as a PostDoc in Bioinformatics and Metabonomics at Univ.Queensland, Australia, and at Imperial College, London. Since 2003 he returned to Umeå University and is presently an associate professor in Chemometrics, director of the Computational Life Science Cluster (CLiC), and also group leader at Umeå Plant Science Center (UPSC), Umeå University. In 2008, Johan was the recipient of the Elsevier Chemometrics award and also the Young Researcher Award. In 2009 he recieved the prestigious Herman Wold medal in gold from the Swedish Chemical Society for his significant contributions in chemometrics. Johan pioneered the development of Orthogonal Projections to Latent Structures (OPLS) method and its extensions, the O2PLS and OPLS-DA methods that are all aimed at improving interpretation and visualization of large complex multivariate data in analytical, biological and medical research projects. The OPLS method is already in use by more than 150 Swedish companies, 50 international institutions and the ten largest pharmaceutical companies in the world. It has also become standard in the rapidly growing field of metabolomics, the quantitative study of small molecules involved in the metabolism. In plant biology, his focus is to integrate the information in a biological system, covered by the systems biology approach based on the O2PLS methodology. More than 2000 transgenic Poplar trees have been grown and and characterised using global phenotyping using low, semi and high throughput molecular profiling techniques. In the Process Analytical Technologies (PAT) area, he is working alongside big pharma industries, AstraZeneca and GlaxoSmithKline, to increase the understanding of manufacturing processes by multi-step experimental design, multivariate characterisation (e.g. spectroscopy and imaging technologies), real-time monitoring, and state of the art modelling. Johan is the Chair of the Chemometrics Chapter within the Swedish Chemical Society, Editorial board member for Journal of Chemometrics and board member of the ISPE Nordic Academic Chapter and Swedish Systems biology workgroup. He has co-authored a number of books and book chapters on chemometrics and metabolomics, served as guest Editor e.g. for the Elsevier Comprehensive Chemometrics series. He is also the founder and webmaster of the well known Homepage of Chemometrics (www.Chemometrics.se).