Rate My Professor Hjalmar Brismar

Hjalmar Brismar is Professor of Experimental Biological Physics in the Department of Applied Physics at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, a position he has held since 2003. He earned a CivIng in Engineering Physics from KTH in 1991 and a PhD in Engineering Physics from KTH in 1996, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University's Biomedical Imaging Laboratory in 1996. Brismar serves as Scientific Director of SciLifeLab and has been Director of the Cellular and Molecular Imaging Platform at SciLifeLab since 2010. He also holds appointments as Principal Researcher and Docent in the Department of Women's and Children's Health at Karolinska Institutet, where he previously served as Assistant Professor from 1997 and Guest Professor from 2003 to 2012. As head of the Cellular Biophysics research group, he leads efforts at the intersection of physics and biology.

Brismar's research investigates fundamental physical principles governing cellular processes, with a focus on Na,K-ATPase as a signal transducer, including ouabain-triggered calcium oscillations that activate anti-apoptotic pathways via Bcl-xL, and neuronal isoforms associated with epilepsy, dystonia, and cognitive deficits. His work employs advanced light microscopy techniques such as STED, PALM, and MINFLUX to achieve nanometer-precision (~2-3 nm) in resolving molecular organization and subcellular dynamics in living cells. He coordinates the National Microscopy Infrastructure (NMI) and Sweden's node in EuroBioImaging, operating national super-resolution facilities. Brismar has supervised 15 PhD theses, 8 licentiate theses, 48 MSc theses, and 16 postdocs. His honors include election to the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences (IVA) in 2010, the SDA distinguished paper award in 2007, and the Sven och Ebba-Christina Hagbergs prize in medicine in 2002. He chaired the National Committee for Molecular Biosciences of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences from 2012 to 2017. Key publications include "Evidence for neurogenesis in the adult mammalian substantia nigra" (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2003), "Ouabain, a steroid hormone that signals with slow calcium oscillations" (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2001), "Dual-Color Expansion Microscopy of Membrane Proteins Using Bioorthogonal Labeling" (Nano Letters, 2026), and "Simultaneous detection of membrane contact dynamics and associated Ca²⁺ signals by reversible chemogenetic reporters" (Nature Communications, 2024).