Carolina Hagberg is Associate Professor and Group Leader at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden. As a Finnish biochemist trained in both vascular and adipocyte biology, her lab is interested in understanding how changes in vascular crosstalk and nutrient uptake to the white adipose tissue contributes to the emergence of obesity-associated comorbidities and cardiometabolic disease. A large focus of the lab has to date been on developing more advanced human organotypic culture systems, allowing for in-depth mechanistic studies of the cellular interactions within adipose tissue in the context of human physiology and pathology. Examples include a human adipocyte-endothelial co-culture method that allows differentiation of unilocular human white adipocytes in vitro (Ioannidou et al, 2022; Baganha et al 2022) and an improved transwell system for assaying organ-specific trademarks of vascular transcytosis (Schipper et al, bioRiv 2024). These models are combined in the lab with analyses of human surgical fat biopsies and vascular function, as well as genetic mouse models, studying among other vascular fatty acid transport, perivascular adipose tissue, adipocyte lipoprotein uptake and the influence of adipose tissue dysfunction on atherosclerotic plaque development. For her track record in vascular biology (Hagberg et al, Nature 2010 & 2012) and obesity research (Li, Hagberg et al, Nature Med., 2021; Hagberg et al, Cell Reports, 2018) she was awarded a Swedish Research Council Starting grant in 2019 and in 2025 an ERC Consolidator grant.
