Johan Elf was born in 1975, in Molala, a small city in the Sweden. He studied at Uppsala University, where he obtained an MSc in Engineering in 2000 and a PhD in Biotechnology in 2004 on stochasticity in intracellular processes. His PhD supervisor was of Prof. Mans Ehrenberg. In 2005 he moved to Harvard University where he developed single molecule methods to study transcription factor kinetics in living cells under the supervision of Prof. Xiaoliang Sunney Xie. In 2008 he became senior lecturer in bioinformatics at Uppsala University and in 2013 he was appointed professor of physical biology. As of 2016 he is a member of the Chemistry class at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.[1]
Elf studies dynamic processes in bacterial cells using sensitive optical methods. His main contributions are in algorithms for spatially-dependent stochastic simulations,[2] single molecule methods for studying molecular search kinetics in living cells,[3][4][5] optical pooled screening [6][7] and antibiotic susceptibility testing.[8]
Companies
In 2017 Elf founded Astrego Diagnostics AB [9] together with Özden Baltekin and Ove Öhman. The company develops rapid antibiotic susceptibility tests based on the academic work[8] from the Elf lab. Elf left the company in 2022 when it was acquired by Sysmex Corporation. Sysmex Astrego was awarded the 8M£ Longitude Prize on AMR in 2024.
^Elf J, Ehrenberg M (December 2004). "Spontaneous separation of bi-stable biochemical systems into spatial domains of opposite phases". Systems Biology. 1 (2): 230–6. doi:10.1049/sb:20045021 (inactive 7 December 2024). PMID17051695.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: DOI inactive as of December 2024 (link)
