Profile

Saedis Saevarsdottir

Professor

    Bio

    Saedis Saevarsdottir is a professor in precision medicine at the Faculty of medicine, University of Iceland, scientist at deCODE genetics and consultant in rheumatology at the Dept. of rheumatology, Landspitali University Hospital in Iceland. She is also affiliated to the Division of Clinical Epidemiology at Karolinska Institutet (KI), where she was associate professor in rheumatology in parallel to her duties as chief rheumatologist and the Head of the Arthritis Unit at the Dept. of rheumatology, Karolinska University Hospital in Sweden, until she moved back to Iceland with her family in the end of 2017. She also represented Stockholm in the steering group of the Swedish Rheumatology Quality Register and is currently on The Joint Committee of the Nordic Medical Research Councils (NOS-M, the ethical board of Landspitali University Hospital, the vice-chairman of the Icelandic Society of Rheumatology and their representative in the Scandinavian Society of Rheumatology. Saedis graduated as a medical doctor from the Faculty of medicine, University of Iceland in 2001 and continued thereafter her doctoral studies in immunology, defending her thesis on complement deficiency in inflammatory diseases in 2005. After that, she continued as a post-doc researcher at KI in parallel to clinical training in internal medicine and rheumatology at Karolinska in 2005-2012. Her research has mainly focused on predictors of the risk and outcome of rheumatoid arthritis, including genetic factors and other biomarkers, clinical and environmental factors. From 2018, she has led genome-wide studies on autoimmune diseases at deCODE genetics. She has supervised nine PhD students at KI as well as supervision on bachelor and post-doc level. She has taught medical students about rheumatology at KI and personalised medicine at the University of Iceland, including co-ordination of the online course in personalised medicine from a Nordic perspective, launched at Coursera in 2022.