Cecilia Hagert is a Lundbeck post-doctoral fellow at Aarhus University in Aarhus, Denmark. She has a thorough background in immunology research, currently investigating the role of the adaptive immune system in SLE with a focus on T follicular regulatory cells. She did her PhD research in Immunology and Microbiology at University of Turku in Turku, Finland with advisors Rikard Holmdahl MD PhD Professor at Karolinska Institute and Sirpa Jalkanen MD PhD Academy Professor at University of Turku. Her focus was on the innate immune system’s role in development of autoimmune disease investigating the development of psoriasis, psoriatic arthritis and rheumatoid arthritis. Her PhD resulted in seven original research papers and one review paper in peer-reviewed journals including Arthritis and Rheumatology, Frontiers of Immunology, JCI Insight and ARS.
Cecilia Hagert’s scientific interests have ranged from the innate immune system to the adaptive immune system’s role in the development of autoimmune diseases such as psoriasis, psoriatic arthritis, rheumatoid arthritis and of late SLE; studying both the diseases at a cellular and at microscopic level, dedicated to solve the enigma of autoimmune diseases.
Her PhD research has been rewarded with several scholarships including The Finnish Cultural Foundation scholarship (€20,000) and a PhD candidate scholarship from the National Doctoral Programme in Informational and Structural Biology (€40,000). Recently, she was awarded the prestigious three-year Lundbeck post-doctoral Fellow grant (DKK 2,400,000).
She has been invited speaker by the Danish Immunological Society in 2018 and to the Imaging Flow Cytometry meeting in 2019. She has also presented at 43rd Scandinavian Society for Immunology (SSI) meeting, Finland in 2016.