Since August 15th, 2026, Eivind Valen and Anthony Mathelier have taken over as joint heads of the ELIXIR Norway node at the University of Oslo, succeeding Rein Aasland. The two will jointly steer the node's role in supporting Norwegian life science research through shared tools and infrastructure.
Their appointment marks a shift toward joint leadership, bringing together two experts in genomics, computational biology, and the development of critical computational tools and resources for the life science community.
Meet the new co-heads
Eivind Valen, Professor at the Department of Biosciences, studies RNA biology and gene regulation using tools such as ribosome profiling, nanopore sequencing and CRISPR. His group leads CHOPCHOP, a web tool for designing CRISPR guide RNAs for genome editing.
Anthony Mathelier, Associate Director and Group Leader at the Norwegian Centre for Molecular Biosciences and Medicine (NCMBM), focuses on gene expression regulation and the mechanisms by which it can be disrupted in diseases. His group leads JASPAR, a widely used database of transcription factor binding models recently recognised as an ELIXIR Core Data Resource.
What is ELIXIR?
ELIXIR is a pan-European collaborative infrastructure with 23 member countries that supports life science researchers in storing, analysing and sharing life science data. ELIXIR Norway is the national node, coordinated from the University of Bergen with local teams at UiO, UiT, NTNU and NMBU. The ELIXIR Oslo node, based at the Department of Biosciences, University of Oslo, is part of the Bioinformatics in Life Science (BiLS) initiative.