Dr. Yannik Schönknecht
Senior Scientific Advisor
Novonesis
Dr. Yannik Schönknecht is a Senior Scientific Advisor at Novonesis, specializing in clinical and pre-clinical research on the health effects of human milk oligosaccharides (HMOs). With a background in Nutritional Physiology and a PhD from the University of Bonn, his work focuses on the role of human milk bioactives, as well as pro- and synbiotics, in infant nutrition and beyond.
He is working to generate robust scientific evidence on human milk bioactives and translating these insights into nutritional applications across the lifespan.
Dr. Stina Jensen
Head of Applied HMO
Novonesis
Stina Rikke Jensen, Ph.D. is Head of Applied HMOs team in Novonesis. She has a great passion for the biology of the gastrointestinal tract and has worked for > 10 years as a scientist focusing on human diseases (inflammatory bowel diseases and diabetes), animal health and recently infant health. She has worked in both the pharmaceutical- and biotechnological industry and joined the company in 2021 where she now is leading a team of highly skilled scientists and technicians working on generating scientific data substantiating the effects of Human Milk Oligosaccharides (HMOs). After many years as a scientist in industry she has gained thorough knowledge of the translational potential of scientific data and has established collaboration platforms with several academic institutions to ensure technological progression.
Guest speaker - Dr. Anja Wellejus
Senior Manager
Novonesis
Dr. Anja Wellejus holds a master’s degree in human biology and a PhD degree from the Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Copenhagen. Her career trajectory spans both academia and small biotech, however the fifteen most recent years of her career has been dedicated to working on pro- post- and synbiotics at Chr. Hansen and Novonesis. Today, Anja leads the preclinical department within Human Health Biosolutions, Novonesis, with the aim to unlock the full potential of biosolutions for human health.
The focus of the group is to screen and characterize established and emerging products uncovering their interactions with the human microbiota, intestinal epithelium and the immune system using in vitro-, animal- and artificial gut models.
Guest speaker - Kristoffer Bender Dalhoff, Ph.D.
Senior Scientist
Novonesis
Kristoffer Bender Dalhoff, Ph.D. is a Senior Scientist in Explorative Biochemical Analytics. He is highly interested in using advanced analytical techniques like targeted and non-targeted LC-(IM)-MSMS methods to study the relation between the gut metabolome and various diseases like inflammatory bowel diseases or mental health, and currently the impact of probiotics and dietary supplements like human milk oligosaccharides (HMOs).He has been working with many different aspects of metabolomics for the last eight years, initially working for a Danish metabolomics CRO before he joined the company in the summer of 2023, where he is now metabolomics lead on the different studies conducted within human and dairy health.