Lene Oddershede

Lene Oddershede is Chief Scientific Officer for Planetary Science & Technology at the Novo Nordisk Foundation, where she leads efforts to advance fundamental knowledge in natural and technical sciences and biotechnology. Until 2025, she served as Senior Vice President responsible for grant activities in natural and technical sciences, with a strong emphasis on interdisciplinary research.

She earned her PhD in physics in 1998 from the University of Copenhagen, where she later became Associate Professor and group leader at the Niels Bohr Institute in 2003 and Full Professor in 2015. Her research focuses on biophysics, light–matter interactions, and nanophotonics, and she established Scandinavia’s first optical tweezers facility. She has led several major interdisciplinary research centres and programmes and has been recognised with awards including the Danish Optical Society Prize, the Elite Research Prize, and the Silver Medal of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters.