News

SfRBM's Senior Awards Committee has announced that the recipient of the 2020 Lifetime Achievement Award is Henrik Poulsen, MD of the University of Copenhagen in Denmark.

Dr. Poulsen is being recognized for his comprehensive and long-term achievement in the translation of the basic aspect of oxidative stress into human diseases and their treatments.

Poulsen is a National Board of Health-certified Clinical Pharmacologist and Professor in Clinical Pharmacology with over 10,000+ citations of his work. He received a Medical Doctorate from the University of Copenhagen in 1978 followed by an eventual professorship to build programs in human toxicology and environmental medicine, which resulted in the establishment of the Institute of Environmental Health at the University of Copenhagen.

Since the early 1990's, Poulsen's research interests have been in pharmacogenetics, pharmacoepidemiology, and oxidative stress damage to nucleic acids. He has pioneered the development of a state-of-the-art methodology to non-invasively measure the effects of oxidative stress on DNA and RNA and have used this in molecular epidemiology. His group’s major achievement has been finding an association between RNA oxidation, death and death from cardiovascular disease, in patients with type 2 diabetes, in patients with severe psychiatric disease and recently also in the general population.

He has been involved in the creation of a database that includes data on biochemical measurements, DNA and RNA oxidation, detailed questionnaires, vital status, hospitals admission and diagnoses, social and economic data, daylight variations, and all drug prescriptions, in almost 20,000 people. The biochemical measures now also include GWAS data from high density SNP analysis, and present efforts are to identify genes of relation to oxidation of RNA and DNA, and to extend these findings to their relation to death and death from cardiovascular disease in the cohorts. Inclusion of microbiome data is in the pipeline.

Dr. Poulsen will give a featured lecture during SfRBM's 27th Annual Conference titled, "A Lifetime With DNA and RNA Oxidation," which will be available virtually. Click here to learn more about Dr. Poulsen and his work.

SfRBM congratulates Dr. Poulsen on this highly deserved honor.